Thoughts on Tao Te Ching

How to Live Your Life According to the Tao The lesson that I take from Tao Te Ching is that everything comes and goes; nothing is set in stone forever, and times will always change. It being said that nothing stays the same forever, there are patterns and cycles in life. I notice these cycles in more than just life. I notice them in the world as well. One example of where these cycles are rather noticeable is in the seasons. Each year we go from spring, to summer, to fall, and finally to my least favorite season of all, winter. The phrase “Opposites attract,” comes to mind when I read Tao Te Ching. Now I know that the phrase is usually said in the context of people, but it can have many different uses. One of the ways that phrase could be applied is with magnets; when both magnets are pointing toward the same pole, they repulse, but switch one around, and bingo, they are attracted. An example of this is “Difficult and easy support each other.” When a person is difficult to please and that person gets married to someone who is easy to please, the difficult one will always find something wrong with the other while the easy one will always be happy with what the other already possesses. To have a sense of one term, one must first understand the other. In the excerpt, the lines, “Long and short define each other,” and “High and low depend on each other,” are great examples. For something to seem long, one must first see how short something else is. If I walk one-kilometer every day and then randomly run a 5k marathon, the one-kilometer run would seem rather short in the grand scheme of time compared to the 5k. Now if I were to live on the ground floor of an apartment building for my whole life and then one day went to the roof which was the 25th floor, and looked off, that would seem like a gigantic fall compared to my ground level window. Without one I would have no perception of what the other could be. Ever heard of the billionaire Warren Buffet? He is a