A Morning Observation That Teaches Yielding
Every morning, you wake up and carry out this simple task. It’s something we take for granted. We even do it without thinking, yet it provides an element that teaches us how to live a much better life.
Before I start my day there is a routine task I complete. It’s something we’re taught as a child. It’s something most of us carry out without thinking.
I go to the bathroom, turn on the cold water tap, and brush my teeth.
Few things are simpler and more routine than this. Yet, we can learn many lessons from this action. I want to focus on one.
Today, I decided to observe what happens when I turn on the tap, examining a key element of life: water.
If I turn the tap fully, a jet of cold water is expelled from the faucet in a powerful, fast-flowing current. If my touch is light, then a trickle of water flows gently into the basin. Sometimes, I can observe just a gentle drop.
Water meanders through my fingers, letting gravity take it through whatever cracks it can find. It’s a highly flexible, free-flowing, mutable element.
If I try to squeeze the water in my hands, it falls through my fingers into the bowl. It’s a soft element that you can’t crush.
Water is fluid and moves wherever it can. Rivers meander towards the freedom of the sea by whatever path they can find. Water is gentle yet powerful. Over time, it cuts a path through hard rock.
Lau Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, observed a special reverence for water 2,500 years ago. He reminds us how much we can learn from nature, particularly water.
Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice.
- 78th verse, Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation)
Takeaways
When you turn on the tap, observe what you can learn from water:
- Stop resisting what appears difficult, and live your life by yielding. Like water, flow everywhere there's an opening, rather than constantly pushing against a door that will never open.
- Stop interfering and trying to help when it's unwelcome. Stream like water unobtrusively where you're needed.
- Trying to control or grasp things is not congruent with the flow and fluidity of life.
- Take a softer approach, be gentle as water to others, and be kind to yourself. Find strength in softness. Remember, over time, flowing water wears away hard, unyielding rock.
- When you feel conflict with others, imagine yourself as gently flowing water to soften how you can change hard relationships.
- Try patience rather than control; like a watercourse that finds its way over time, it will triumph.
- Be in harmony with life, like water is in nature.
Wishing you well,
Howard
"I don't know what I don't know, and I'm always a work in progress."