The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life

We tend to believe that to change the world, we have to think big. Confucius wouldn't dispute this, but he would likely also say. Don't ignore the small. Don't forget the "pleases" and "thank yous." Change doesn't happen until people alter their behavior, and they don't alter their behavior unless they start with the small.

When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.

True imagination and creativity don’t come from thinking outside the box or letting ourselves go wild, just as true spontaneity does not come from dancing on a table on the weekend while you remain in your tedious job. They don’t come out of great disruptive moments that break forth from an otherwise ordinary, drab life. They are part and parcel of how we live our every day; all moments can be creative and spontaneous when we experience the entire world as an open and expansive place. We get there by constantly cultivating our ability to imagine transcending our own experience.

Our lives begin in the everyday and stay in the everyday. Only in the everyday can we begin to create truly great worlds.

The psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) once wrote, “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him”—a surprisingly Confucian sentiment.

Ming is not just about the tragedies that befall us. It’s about the good things, too; the unexpected opportunities, unforeseen chances to do something we love, the chance encounter with someone who will change the trajectory of our whole life. When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.

Confucius's disciples frequently asked him to define goodness. He would give each of them a different answer each time, depending on the situation. That's because Confucian goodness is not something you can define in the abstract. It's the ability to respond well to others; the development of a sensibility that enables you to behave in ways that are good for those around you and to draw out their own better sides.

Our habits limit what we can see, access, sense, and know.

You can dam and direct the water, and you can force it to remain on the top of a mountain without flowing down. But is this what water's nature really is? It is what you have done to it that makes it so. Humans can also be made to be not good in the same way. " - Mencius

You do not yet understand life - how could you understand death?" - Confucius

You can embrace life by opening up yourself to see the task of ironing a shirt not as a tiresome chore but as an exercise in cultivating trained spontaneity; a head cold not as inconvenient but as a chance to cozy up in bed reading novels; a canceled wedding engagement not as heartbreak but as an opportunity for a new future.

But we tend to either neglect our sprouts, forgetting to water or nourish them, or else we are too forceful: we grab them and try to tug at them to make them grow. Not only do we disrupt our natural goodness, but also we become miserable, easily dominated by our worst instincts: jealousy, anger, and resentment. When we do this, we harm our own humanity and harm those around us. By unleashing the worst in ourselves, we bring out the worst in others and cause them to kill their sprouts too. Most of us fail to achieve our potential, but this is not how it has to be.

Will we act according to where we are stuck in the moment, or will we act in a way that opens up a constellation of possibilities?

By making concrete, defined plans, you are actually being abstract, because you are making these plans for a self that is abstract: a future self that you imagine based on who you think you are now, even though you, the world, and your circumstances will change. You cut yourself off from the real, messy complexities that are the basis from which you can develop as a human being. You eliminate your ability to grow as a person because you are limiting that growth to what is in the best interests of the person you happen to be right now, and not the person you will become.

There is no ethical or moral framework that transcends context and the complexity of human life. All we have is the messy world within which to work and better ourselves. These ordinary as-if rituals are the means by which we imagine new realities over time construct new worlds. Our lives begin in the everyday and stay in the everyday. Only in the everyday can we begin to create truly great worlds.

How are you living your life on a daily basis?

Living in a capricious world means accepting that we do not live within a stable moral cosmos that will always reward people for what they do. We should not deny that real tragedies happen. But at the same time, we should always expect to be surprised and learn to work with whatever befalls us. If we continue this work, even when tragedies come our way, we can begin to accept the world as unpredictable and impossible to understand perfectly. And this is where the promise of a capricious world lies; if our world is indeed constantly fragmented and unpredicatable, then it is something we can constantly work on bettering. We can go into each situation resolved to be the best human being we can be, not because of what we'll get our of it, but simply to affect others around us for the better, regardless of the outcome. We can cultivate our better sides and face this unpredicatble world, transforming as we go.

Things will happen that we can’t control, but we have a choice to act: to get out of the way of the falling wall, to respond to our ming and shape our future accordingly.

When we can let go of the idea that there are clear guidelines and a stable world, then what we are left with is the heart-mind to guide us. The heart-mind is all there is, and we develop it every day through our relationships with the people we’re with. It helps us to sense things correctly, to lay the groundwork for growth, and to work with what we have. And as you do so, all that you thought you were will begin to change. You will find parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. The world you once thought of as stable starts instead to seem like a world of infinite possibilities.

True influence isn't to be found in over strength or will. It comes from creating a world that feels so natural that no one questions it. This is how a Laozian safe wields enormous influence.

With all this investment in our self-definition, we risk building our future on a very narrow sense of who we are - what we see as our strengths and weaknesses, our likes and dislikes. Many Chinese thinkers might say that in doing this, we are looking at such a small part of who we are potentially. We're taking a limited number of our emotional dispositions during a certain time and place and allowing those to define us forever. By thinking of human nature as monolithic, we instantly limit our potential.

This is how we tend to learn about world history: as discrete civilizations that developed on their own over time. Now imagine a different kind of museum, one organized solely by era. You could stroll through a gallery, for example, and see a Roman silver denarius coin, a bronze coin from China’s Han dynasty, and a punch-marked coin from India’s Mauryan Empire. You would see right away that three major civilizations were going through remarkably similar changes at roughly the same time, despite the vast distance between them: each had become an empire, and each was running an economy based upon coin currency.

The key for the players is to be conscious that they are pretending; that together they have entered an alternate reality in which they imagine different sides of themselves.