Be Like Water #027

Hello, and welcome back to Every Dawn, where I try to give you one thought every morning to accompany you through your day.

Today, I was driving with my car, bringing my children to school, and on the way back, there is a very narrow street where I have to pass, and there's always traffic from the other side. In this case, there were two bicycles coming from the other side, behind them a truck, behind me other cars, and in front of me, a man with a huge garbage container, and he was pushing it slowly to the corner where the garbage collection point is.

So, I was stuck there and I couldn't go anywhere, and I just waited. I just waited behind the garbage container until he had moved slowly and the bicycles had passed, and then after a while, the way was free, and I could continue.

And I thought at this moment that this could have gone differently, and it's not that I am particularly good at this, even I could have reacted differently at a different time of day or in a different mood. It was just that I was relaxed at this moment, and I wasn't in a hurry, and so I could wait, and so everything just worked out eventually on this street, and I did not feel impatient, I did not feel anything negative, but I could have. And I could have tried to, you know, honk the garbage man out of the way, to sneak over to the other side where the bicycles were, and, you know, push them away, and to make my way through the situation in a way that would have been dangerous to everyone, would have upset everyone, and would have also upset me.

When this was over, and I was rolling again, I felt good about it. I felt at peace with myself and with these other people who were in my way for a moment, and I felt that we had all handled this well. But it doesn't always go like this, you know this perhaps from your own experience. Sometimes you are impatient, sometimes you don't want to wait, sometimes you feel like everybody's in your way, and thinking about this, I was reminded of the saying in the Dao De Jing.

You know, the Dao is this Chinese book of wisdom, and at some point in the Dao, it is said that the wise man is like water. And this is often understood as that you should give in, you should not oppose what is happening, that the wise man should just be soft and following and going along with whatever happens. But at this moment today, I suddenly had this realization that this was what it meant. At this moment, with these obstacles on the various sides of the road, I had actually acted like water.

Water would have stopped flowing in front of an obstacle, it would have waited, and it would eventually have found a way through, but without pushing anybody else out of the way. It's water, it's not a bullet, it's not a herd of some wild animal stampeding and pushing everything out of the way. Water is soft, but it always gets what it wants, it always goes where it wants to be. And you know this if you have ever had a flooded basement after a rain, that water does go wherever it wants, it cannot be stopped.

The point of being like water is not being soft and giving in and discounting your own interests; this is not what water does. The point of being like water is to be clever about what you want, to be patient, but in the end, even more efficiently, to get where you want to be, and at the same time to be beneficial to everyone. Water can be dangerous, water can flood places, you can drown in water, but water is also the source of life, it is the most precious substance for life on Earth.

And as you go through your day, when you encounter obstacles, if you are like water, this means much more than just giving way, it means being clever in the way you pursue your goals, so that in the end, you do reach your goals, but you don't do it through force, you don't necessarily cause damage. You could, but most of the time you don't, most of the time your action will even be beneficial, and people will think that you were beneficial, this interaction was beneficial to them, that you were a valuable addition to their day. Like these bicyclists I passed today, they did not feel harassed by my car, I was waiting there patiently and let them pass, they were happy, the man with the garbage bin was happy, because I could wait like water, and in the end, everybody was happy, and we were all successful in navigating this situation.

It is a small thing, but it just reminded me that sometimes the wisdom of philosophy is not something abstract where you have to be a philosopher, you have to, you know, think about crazy, complicated theories. Sometimes the wisdom of philosophy is something very simple, and the deepest wisdom is often very simple, it is something that manifests itself in an everyday situation like driving on a crowded street, and suddenly you realize what this millennia-old book, the Dao, what it actually wants to say, and you realize that you're part of this world, and part of the flow of this world, and that you are indeed like water, that you can be like water.

And if we manage to all be more like water, then perhaps our world would be better, more peaceful, and have less conflict than it does now. Thank you, and see you tomorrow.