Merry Meet to all of you!
You probably wonder, what the title is about?
Well, it's just something I came up with, when life gets on top of me sometimes and everything seems a struggle.
In Taoism, one of the roots of unhappiness, ill-contentment and negative personal energy is our constant striving in the material world. In our society, it gets ingrained in most of us from a very early age, that it is the most important in life, to be successful - in both personal relationships as well as career wise. People tend to measure their self-worth in what they have been able to achieve and amass in material possessions. The pressure to keep up a 'successful, perfect' image puts a huge emphasis on constantly 'bettering yourself' and achieve more, and there are no excuses allowed, if you can't keep up.
This strive for socially accepted 'perfection' in your life can lead to rigidity and the inability to deal with changes, which might not fit into your 'personal achievement plan' and thus affect self-worth in a negative way.
Taoism teaches that you can reach happiness and contentment by detachment to the material world. Now, that sounds pretty profound and a bit scary, but the core of it means: you have to learn to bend with the flow of life, in good phases as well as bad, and stop denying yourself the right to regress and re-assess...and yes - to feel sad and awful.
Stop striving for societies blind prescription of 'happily ever after' at all costs!
That's why I call it 'the wisdom of grass', because why is grass one of the most successful species on Earth? It is flexible and bends with every direction the wind might blow from and so it survives!
It is an allegory of embracing change instead of fighting against it (the grass would break
standing up to the wind).
So the next time life puts you on a low ebb, visualize a great plain of grass swaying with the strong wind, and how it will not break, but stand upright again, once the storm is over.
Warm Blessings,
Ilona
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