Does Life Have to Be This Hard? | Tao Te Ching Chapter 73 Explained

Being overbold and confident is deadly. The wise use of caution will keep you alive. One is the way to death, and the other is the way to preserve your life. Who can understand the workings of heaven? The Tao of the universe does not compete, yet wins, does not speak, yet responds, does not command, yet is obeyed, and does act, but is good at directing. The nets of heaven are wide, but nothing escapes its grasp. There are certainly advantages to being brave, but an excess of bravery without the temperance of wisdom and caution can lead to problems. All bravery is not created equally. I think one way to evaluate the nature of our bravery is to look at its motivations. Are we brave in order to gratify our egos? Do we do brave things from a sense of grandeur or self-importance? Or are we brave when the situation calls for it, simply because we understand that something needs to be done? Is our bravery brave for the sake of accomplishing something important, or for the sake of proving something to ourselves or others? The Tao certainly doesn't do anything in order to prove itself. Even though it takes care of everything in the universe, it does not resist obscurity. In fact, it chooses it. Moving farther down into the chapter, we read a couple of these interesting paradoxes of the Tao. The first of these paradoxes seemed to jump out at me a little bit. The Tao does not compete, yet wins. It is always triumphant, and yet it does not get caught up in competition or power struggles. It accomplishes everything by virtue of what it is. I heard an interesting perspective this last week, and I think it was from an interview between Malcolm Gladwell and David Epstein, where someone said something to the point of, when a person is well-matched to their work, it will often seem like they have a lot of grit, but to them it doesn't feel like grit. It feels natural. I think that this is a pretty decent representation of what it is like to follow the Tao. Just as the Tao does not accomplish its ends through strenuous competition, if we are following the personal path laid out for us by Tao, there will be a lot of times when it will seem like we are working really hard because of all we're getting done, but in actuality it doesn't feel to us like we're working hard at all. I've seen this dramatically in my own life over the course of this Tao Te Ching daily upload challenge. I've worked many different jobs in my life, mostly revolving around IT and computers. My last quote-unquote real job was as a network technician at a local school district. Although I didn't mind the people at the job, and there were some things I liked about it, one thing I noticed was that it always felt like I had to just force myself through the work, like I was always having to just put my head down and slog through it. I noticed this with a lot of the jobs that I've held in the past. During the course of this challenge, I've noticed an interesting thing though. I recently was just listening to a presentation from Mike Duncan at a book signing he did a few years back. Now, if you don't know who Mike Duncan is, in my opinion, he is one of the greatest history writers and podcasters I know of. I've been pretty engrossed in his Revolutions podcast for about two years now, and I really admire him for the detailed, well-informed, and well-spoken narratives he uses to lay out so many of the amazing stories throughout history. He really just makes you feel like you're reading a great book of fiction, but the stories are real. Anyway, I remember hearing him say how much he writes in a given week for the podcast, and suddenly realizing that I write about the same amount for the doubting challenge, which is crazy to me because that's his job, and for me it's just kind of a hobby. But when I write, it usually doesn't feel like hard work. Often, I'll work straight through meals without even realizing. Some days I just get so caught up it doesn't feel like work at all. Now, I do need to add some caveats here, lest any of you take this out of context. I am not, repeat, not telling anybody that they should quit their job to go change to something else. That is a very personal decision that is so dependent on individual circumstances and intuition that it would be incredibly irresponsible of me to make a recommendation like that. I'm also not making some kind of claim that if you just find your true calling, it'll always be easy, and it'll never feel like work, and everything will always go great. Writing comes pretty easy to me now, but it wasn't always like that. I used to go literal months or even up to a year without uploading because I just couldn't face the idea of starting another script. I believe that writing feels this way now, partly because it's where my path has led me for now, but also largely due to the fact that I felt impressed to start this challenge of daily uploads. Before this challenge, I was never very consistent about uploading, but I do think that the exposure of just writing every single day no matter what has helped to make it so that it feels a lot easier now. Writing hasn't always been easy, but through following my intuition and walking my own personal path that DAO has shown me, it now feels that way. I guess it's just one of those things that it's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it for yourself. I have tried to force things that weren't on my path before, and it feels totally different. There's a difference between working at something that you were meant to do, and trying to force something that isn't on your path. It's you'll have to learn for yourself. Just please don't go quit your job and sort of screw around with a hobby and then blame me that it didn't work out. This is far from what I'm saying. What I am saying is that we all have the ability to respond to intuition, and that we can know for ourselves if we're on the right path for us. If you don't know whether or not you're on the right path, start meditating on this, or praying if that's your thing, and then just listen. Listen as you go about your life. Be attentive to the feelings that come and the thoughts that seem to call you in certain directions. You can know a thought to go in a certain direction is good because it will feel like peace. If you're feeling that you need to be on a different path than you're on now, make up your mind that you'll do whatever it takes to get on that right path, and the next step will become apparent to you. Again, you'll know it's the right thing because it will feel like peace. Not comfort, not even necessarily excitement, but peace. You can feel peace while doing something uncomfortable or even unpleasant. I feel like this is starting to get a little rambly and it's getting late, so for now I will nag you again to join the discord and say thank you for watching, and I will see you all tomorrow for chapter 74. Peace and blessings.