Embracing Obstacles as Growth
A Taoist Approach to Overcoming Difficulty
To go through life and lay witness to the challenges and obstacles, the nightly news cycles, the bank balance, and celebrity culture is to live in the shadow of scarcity. If you expect difficulty it's what will be served up to us time and time again as it's what you have trained yourself to see. Our frequency, much like a radio dial, will simply broadcast the station we have tuned it to. The ancients have long counselled us to look to our setbacks and delays as opportunities to refine and adapt rather than as punishments and retributions for wrongs done.
Winter asks you to decalcify the lens.
Shifting from Scarcity to Abundance in the Face of Obstacles
Seasons will change gracefully or destructively, either way, nature’s behaviour cant be classified in terms of good and bad. We build homes in what was once a desert and water our gardens during drought making good of the bad times, learning a little, making new friends, finding a new way. In the same vein, a bushfire clears the forest and activates the seeds for new growth, knowing that good fortune often perches on disaster.
Nature’s Lesson: Growth Through Destruction
Earthquakes, floods, and landslides all happen within a tiny geological moment, and we build lives on the same impermanent structure. The systems of governance, world currency, global borders and infrastructure are all subject to the same temporary state. As we witness global events going through powerful change, as people take to the streets in protest throughout Europe, refugees swamp the cities and towns, and the US decides that cluster bombs are the answer, we could be forgiven for feeling dismayed or depressed at best.
However, liberation from worry at the rise and fall of things is at the heart of the seasonal work, leaning into the flow of cycles we learn to follow life on its terms with an accepting attitude, discovering more and losing less along the way.
Finding Liberation in Life’s Cycles
Winters pared back stillness and penetrating silence asks us to drop our preconceived expectations, and be open to the beauty of change and grace. Grace is our inner light, an attitude of acceptance that radiates outwardly as joy, regardless of what is unfolding. When we chose to tune to grace we open what is closed, and light the darkness. Grace is the life of the lifeless.
Grace in Adversity: Turning Hardship into Light
Over time, we recognize all experience as the graceful way that life leads us where we need to be. It doesn't happen to you, it happens for you. You can emulate grace and open joyfully, or let the monuments we have built to commemorate the past become our prisons. In proportion to our willingness to leave them, we will experience the power of grace. It is a message of optimism without judgment, it is the silver lining we have yet to see. On the pathway, we will discover: it is all good.
