Tao Te Ching – Verse 74

If you realize that all things change,

there is nothing you will try to hold on to.

If you aren’t afraid of dying,

there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future

is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.

When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,

chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

I’ve been thinking alot about this transition that we’re living through. At times, I feel like I’m having a hard time grasping anything tangible. It’s a huge lesson on impermanence.

“It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

The pandemic has been jolting to our routines, our social lives, and it’s stopped us in our tracks, forcing us to reflect on the things we take for granted. The upcoming election has many of us in a state of anxious anticipation.

In a letter from the UUA’s Southern Region, I read:

Like you we’re keeping an eye on the news and wondering what the next few weeks might bring in terms of increased civic unrest and more assaults on our civil rights and the most vulnerable in our communities. While it’s impossible to predict what is to come – and we pray that our streets remain calm and our electoral process proceeds appropriately – it is wise to think ahead to what we can do to manage the unexpected and help out as our communities need us.

And, as we fight for racial, social, and economic equality, we know we are working towards something different, but do we really understand just how different that needs to be? I don’t think we’ve really grasped the reality that our political, economic, social, and cultural structures need to be drastically changed and what that requires of us personally.

In much of the rhetoric about racial and environmental justice, we hear the phrase “we need to be good ancestors”. What does that look like? It isn’t something to be taken lightly. It isn’t about simple change, like switching out those old energy sucking light bulbs for an LED bulb. It’s about a complete rewrite of the stories we tell ourselves about our relationship with nature, and with one another (for we are not really separate from nature). We can no longer imagine that just by securing a livelihood for ourselves and passing on to our children and grandchildren the skills needed to survive in the world as we know it, is being a good ancestor. Progress is not what our ancestors expected. And, because of what we’ve thought progress was supposed to have looked like, people have been treated as machines, and the Earth has been abused.

“…[V]irtually none of the assumptions made about the relationship between ancestors and descendants that would have characterized our industrial cultures up to now can be expected to hold going forward. The world is changing too rapidly—and by that I don’t just mean politics, and economics, and culture—I mean the physical planet.” (https://scholarsandrogues.com/2017/04/17/becoming-a-good-ancestor/)

We cannot control the future, let alone even imagine it. But we can do what is required of us now to shift things in a more loving, peaceful, and sustainable direction. How much are you willing to change? Are we here just for the sake of our own survival or are we here to cocreate meaning?