Soften To Stay Strong (Tao Te Ching 76)

It is important to be flexible rather than brittle in life, in our families, at work, and when it comes to entire nations. After discussing several recent events in the world news and our lives, we discuss the principle in Tao Te Ching 76 that flexibility is related to youth and life but rigidity is associated with death. In other words, we should bend rather than break as we exist in the wins of time. We introduce but do not fully tease out the thesis of Sarah Allan, that we who are conditioned by Western thought should avoid realizing that nature (and water in particular) does not serve as an illustration for divine and abstract realities, but rather is the root metaphor itself and arguably even the root reality.