My Brother, the (accidental) Taoist

On rare occasions, my brother makes a good point. In this case, a damned good point at that. Who knew that what he’d been telling me all along was so incredibly enlightened as to have its own ancient tradition?

I’m talking about the Taoist principle Wu-Wei.

I came across a list of book recommendations on optimism, positive psychology and the like, the other day. Since I had heard of the title before, I got my hands on a copy of a book called The Tao of Pooh (just so you know, I considered calling this post The Tao of Pao). It’s a short book that explains the principles of Taoism through Winnie The Pooh and vice versa. Pooh, as anyone who’s ever read/watched him, is a self-confessed Bear of Little Brain, from whom there are a million lessons to be learned.

The halfway point.

I am now officially halfway through this year we call Honours. This blog was born out of the confusion and chaos of this thing called ‘having to decide’ at the start of this year. Smack dab in the middle of 2012, I find myself in the same position – with the ticking of the clock loud in my ear, the weight of decisions starting to bear heavy on my shoulders, the future breathing down my neck. But. It’s not all bad.

Since deciding to come back to uni, here are some of the things I’ve been up to so far….

Coming to the defense of my arts degree

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and this dude comes along and jumps right into our conversation. With his pizza and his little stare, he started bagging my arts degree. He started with saying, “I can’t believe the entrance scores for Arts and Science are the same. Clearly Science is much harder.” Clearly! It went straight downhill from there until all I could do was cross my legs and my arms and gaze off into the distance, biting my tongue. I don’t know why I was so mad. I’ve had people bag my arts degree before – my brother, my cousins, and all those articles on Yahoo! that tell me my degree is useless. And it probably is, for practicality’s sake, but what about the place of beauty and pleasure in the world?

My friend asked me, when we had left (under the excuse that I was freezing and needed to be indoors), why I hadn’t said that, why I hadn’t defended my arts degree. And…I don’t know. Probably because there was absolutely nothing witty that came to mind to defend my degree just because there’s something intrinsically important about the arts that I had never thought of defending it before. All I wanted to say to the dude was, “You. Me. Outside. Now” (add threatening hand gestures here).

On living in the present.

“For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

Lev Grossman, The Magicians

Sometimes I wonder if all I’m ever meant to do is wait for the next big thing to come. Okay, I don’t wonder about it or wish it upon myself so much as fear that this might be the recurring pattern in my life, the groove in the wheel that I’ll forever be stuck on. All this web-surfing, this blog-reading is making my miserable ethics essay seem even more and more miserable. Of course these beautiful sunshiney days we’re having doesn’t help one bit either.

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