This, That and Something Else

Read the Tao Te Ching or Chuang Tzu (Daodejing or Zhuangzi) and you can't help but to run into the metaphor of water over and over and over again. To live a life of Tao, we are told, we need to be like water. As we navigate our way through life, we should remember that water always seeks the low places.

What precisely does this mean? How do we apply it to the routine elements of our lives? How do we live like water?

Whether we're discussing the classic Taoist texts, the Torah, the Koran or the Christian Bible, there is no definitive answer to almost any of our questions. None of these documents provides a detailed and specific road map to get us from Point A to Point B. Each, in its own way, is a nebulous guidebook; each points to a few generalized landmarks to help us along the way.

We can, of course, find numerous individuals -- both living and dead -- who will tell us that this or that specific passage, in whichever of these books a person fancies, means something stark and definitive. They can marshal all sorts of exhibits and illustrations to "prove" that their interpretation is THE interpretation. They can amass legions of followers who will swear that the individual is somehow "in the know" -- a possessor of knowledge far above the norm.

But they don't know. They can't know. They didn't write it. And the vast majority of them even weren't alive when it was written!

The ONLY person who may know what a written instrument means is the person or persons who wrote it. (I use the word may because, sometimes, you or I can write something and we're not even sure what we meant after the fact!) Since all the various documents we revere -- for one reason or another -- were written hundreds or thousands of years ago, we can't interview the author[s] to see what they meant.

So, we look upon these documents with modern eyes and this singular fact strongly impacts how we interpret the meaning. Because the authors lived a very long ago time, we can't begin to understand the context of their lives; a context which is key fully to understand the impetus for and the meaning of their words. While we may have a loose handle on the history of a certain period, we in no way can understand the minutia of their routine existence. Our more modern civilization precludes this kind of understanding.

I am not making an argument that we should cast off that which has come before. I am not suggesting that all such books, stories and fables be burned in the village square. The insights of yesterday are as sagacious now as they were in their own time. What I am suggesting is that we must realize that the ancient works are no more or no less valuable than what each of us can directly experience in our own lives today.

Each of us writes our own book as we trod down the paths of our lives. While there's nothing wrong with seeking inspiration from a book written by others, the book that matters most of all is the one you and I write. It's the ONLY one that any of us can hope to understand word for word.