Chapter 23.1: Practicing Hopeful Authenticity through the Storms of Life

It is rare to speak of ourselves authentically – just as we are. 

The whirling winds don’t last through the morning,

The torrential, galloping rains don’t last through the day. 

Who makes these?  Heaven and earth. 

If natural disasters don't last long, 

how much less so people's hardships?

As human beings we talk a lot, but how often do we speak of where we really are, how things are really going in our lives?  More often than not we put up walls.  As we put ourselves on display and ride the roller coaster of relative worth, we create false facades, images of how we want others to see us – like Potemkin villages.  We whitewash our lives to look amazing.  We Photoshop out the blemishes we want to hide.  By doing so we rob ourselves of our own worth and fall victim to the beauty trap and other subjective social stereotypes.  We often justify doing so by saying that we don’t want to burden others – so we suffer in silence.

We all tell stories about ourselves and even to ourselves.  Some are funny, some are tragic.  Others are cautionary.  The most important stories that we tell are the narratives we construct about ourselves and the world around us.  For, these narratives give meaning to and create filters for our life experiences.  As Steven R. Covey (1932-2012) put it in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or, as we are conditioned to see it.” What happens in our lives is not nearly as important as the stories we create and the meaning we ascribe to what has happened.  When we reduce the words we speak and the stories we tell, we allow ourselves to just be who we are, as we are without needing to spin yarns or embellish ourselves with speech.  We so often do so to cover up the pain of hardship and setback – the hard times – because we feel insufficient in some way, we feel like we shouldn’t have hard times, or that the trials say something about who we are.  We can take charge of our self-talk especially during hard times and empower ourselves with encouraging words and authentic affirmations.

Even the fiercest winds, most torrential storms, and hardest times in our lives are only temporary.  Natural disasters may strike without warning and turn our world upside down but if even those don’t last forever, how much more so the personal, emotional, and relational difficulties we face?  How much more suffering do we bring upon ourselves by trying to hide them?  The secret to weathering the storms of life is authenticity – to be and accept ourselves and others, where we are and as we are without the need to tell stories or appear a certain way in the world or put ourselves on display.  So choose to be authentic – to be just as we are, where we are and accept that it is okay, that we are enough.  Our trials and struggles don’t diminish our worth or identity in this world at all.  It’s okay to not be okay sometimes.  The storms of life are not who we are, they are simply where we are and what we are going through in this present moment.  They shall pass.  We’ll get through them.  We’ll be okay.  It will work out. 

Translation Notes: The opening stanza 希言自然 is puzzling.  At first glance, it seems out of place and disconnected from the rest of the chapter.  Standard renderings of the phrase have followed traditional commentaries identifying this as advice to a ruler who should “reduce one’s decrees and focus on just being.”  This goes back to the idea that the Way is course of action not just a theoretical discourse.  Taken as a whole, this interpretation conveys the idea that a ruler should not be reactionary and should withhold excessive decrees and allow things to take their course and work themselves out with “unmediated action.”  The same would hold true for each of us as we reduce our speech, the narratives we construct and the stories we tell in response to the trials of our lives.  We don’t have to make everything mean something and we need to be cognizant of what meaning we assign to the hard things in our lives.  Difficulties don’t have to be “proof” that we are doomed to be victims.

Additionally, the character 希 also means ‘rare’ and would convey the idea that it is rare to speak of ourselves as we are (自然, which refers to oneself 自己 just as one its 然, a fusion word or contraction of 如之, which means to be as it is) – or authentically.  The character 希 also alludes to something that we experience rarely – hope.  Speaking of ourselves as we really are allows us to choose hope – something we can’t do if we aren’t being real or honest with ourselves about where we are in our lives because we feel like we have to look a certain way.  The great thing about the polysemic nature of Chinese is that all meanings of any word are always simultaneously available to us.  This allows for numerous layers and levels of complementary, rather than contradictory meanings or competing interpretations.  So we can read it both ways.  We can reduce the narratives we speak in our lives and get to an authentic place of just being who we are as we are – even as we work to get from where we are to where we want to be – and we can take control of our self-talk and speak hopeful words from a place of authenticity even during hard times.  There is a huge difference between telling someone, “I’m fine. I’m doing great” when we aren’t really and acknowledging, “I’m not where I want to be right now, I’m having a hard time” or “I’m working my way through some things and I could use some help and encouragement.”  That acknowledgement is actually an affirmation of hope. This reading has the benefit of connecting the first stanza to the rest of the passage about the storms of life and the rest of the chapter, which is about connecting with others through empathy.  ~ DCB