One of the very few “important”** books in my life is the Tao te Ching. I have always held to the Stephen Mitchell translation because he expertly crosses and mixes gender and non gender… making it a more fluid and identifiable concept of all and one.
Okay… so…
In the last couple years… between normal “we all have to deal with this stuff” life events, the direction of country, the last political election, my irrationalism in response to religion…. I notice that anger seeping back in. It is no big deal… nothing like “rage rawr anger violence”… I am just saying when the extremes of your passions and emotions get the best of you.
Passion is good, but navigating it to understand how it manifests is important. I was completely forgetting that.
So anyhoo, I had picked it up again a couple weeks before the election and am constantly reading it, over and over.
It amazes me. Completely. I can feel that change. You should see me in traffic. I am pretty calm driver, but where I found moments of passive aggression, now it is totally… well I slow down and let whatever is happening around me happen and just flow through it.
Sounds stupid? I dunno… but it is an amazing book. I have found myself reading more, being online less… and just existing in a much more fulfilled and less panicked state. We could all use that about now.
** I can say, without hesitation, two more of the most important books would be Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Carl Sagan’s “The Demon Haunted World” and the compassionate, moving, skeptical, passionate, humanist, atheist literature that came after that.