Don’t get hung up on the good or the bad – Taoist key to true wisdom

We all get hung up on chasing the good things of life, while doing all we can to avoid the bad, deluding ourselves into believing life’s solely a linear process, overlooking its lateral circular aspect and its inherent yin-yang (contraction-expansion) cycles. All manifest reality is relative, hence changes from good to bad or vice versa depending on lighting and camera angle. For instance you may have always wanted a super-car, considering it a symbol of what’s good in life, finally get one, feel damn swell about it, only to find yourself spending all your time and money in gas stations filling it and feeling ashamed for contributing to climate change and throwing your wealth in the face of those less fortunate and feeling damn bad about it all. Or you may find yourself in the pits of despair for having lost your job, only to find this opens the way to finding your true life’s work, or pick any other clichéd example like that you can conjure up for yourself.

The art is to learn to welcome all eventualities, apparently good or bad equally, with equanimity and equipoise, magnanimity and even magnapoise if such a state existed. And to always remember the whole show cycles from yin to yang and yang to yin so there’s no point pinning the meaning of life on achieving just one aspect of the cycle – in fact it’d be plain silly.

And where does this leave you? Strolling along singing your song not investing too heavily in right, not investing too heavily in wrong, knowing that it’s all ultimately illusory and loving it for that, as it’s the best and only game there is anyway.

Love, B