The Way...

Though I am not a Taoist, some aspects of the Tao appeal to my own world view. There is one paragraph in Chapter 1 of Chuang Tzu that is in complete alignment with my own world view. It is written “…a man who has enough wisdom to fill one office effectively, good conduct enough to impress one community, virtue enough to please one ruler…has the same kind of self-pride…as little creatures”. This means that it is not good enough to excel in only one facet of your life. I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. It doesn’t matter how good you are in one area in life if the rest of it is in disarray. It doesn’t matter much to me how successful a person is or what a great athlete they happen to be if they fail to be a good husband and father. People always seem surprised when celebrities and entertainers engage in certain types of behavior; it because outside of what they do their lives are quite disharmonious. The second part of the paragraph also plays into that equation: “The whole world could praise Sung Jung-tzu, and it wouldn’t make him exert himself, the whole world could condemn him and he wouldn’t mope…As far as the world went, he didn’t fret and worry”. This means that being true to one’s self if most important of all. It is less important how everybody else views you than how you view yourself. Again, a noted celebrity overdosed on drugs when they “had it all” in the eyes of the people, but they saw themselves as a failure in the rest of the aspects of their life. At the end of the day, it is not how you look in the eyes of the world that defines you as a person, it how you look in your own eyes.