A passage from today's NYT:
Among the few certain truths of Sept. 11, 2001, is one that applies to every day that dawns. That there is no guarantee of tomorrow, or the next five minutes. This is the central provision of all contracts between people and their lives. No plans, large or small, are exempt.
This made me think immediately of some lines from the Tao Te Ching:
Heaven and Earth are Inhumane:
They treat the ten thousand things like straw dogs. (5)
In other words natural processes, including the machinations of the human mind, and fate can produce terrible events, treating all things, people included, like "straw dogs" (i.e. figures used for ritual purposes and then cast aside). We mere mortals can never fully understand when or how something bad is going to happen to us, be it a man-made disaster like 9/11 or a natural disaster like Katrina. Moreover, Taoism does not invoke a singular God as the creator of all things and knower of all things. There is no one presence to blame for the bad or credit for the good. Of course, there is individual responsibility for particular acts, like 9/11, but the continual repetition of inhumanity through the sweep of history is not the will of a Job-tormenting God; it is the inevitable expression of a capricious Way, that hard-to-define totality of all complex natural processes occurring all at once, extending from being to non-being.
The good and the bad just happen, and always will happen, regardless of our prayers or desires. Although Americans, and other people around the world, have a hard time finding comfort in the idea that the ebb and flow of good and bad are beyond our comprehension or control, Taoism is not a nihilistic escape from that reality. Quite the contrary, it is a clear-eyed acceptance of it. It tells us to to live in this moment, especially if it is a good one, and celebrate it, because the unpredictable currents of Way could turn at any time.
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