Alexandersmap

    Tag: Bruce Lee

    • Fluidity

      “When you cut water, the water doesn’t get hurt; when you cut something solid, it breaks. You’ve got solid attitudes inside you; you’ve got solid illusions inside you; that’s what bumps against nature, that’s where you get hurt, that’s where the pain comes from.” —Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Be fluid and the world becomes easier to navigate. Be rigid and you’ll soon find you keep running into things that contradict all that you believed. ’tis easier to flow through life open to whatever the day brings. If we find we don’t like what we encounter, flow in a different direction. We get to reinvent ourselves with every step if we break the mold of identity that holds us in place.

      We know that there are plenty of people who are rigid and unmoving. The “my way of the highway” types. Many of these people rise to power and influence history. But they’re often weak at the core; predictable, playable, easily distracted by a skilled tactician. They may be powerful, but they’re vulnerable at the same time. When we are creative, fluid and aware, we can navigate our way past them. The river always finds its way to the ocean.

      “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
      Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
      ― Bruce Lee

      Does fluidity mean that we don’t stand for anything? Is that which we stand for a sign of rigidity? This is an exercise in what is essential for us in our lives. Is our identity locked in family or career or accolades? Is it honor? What is honor but a rigid belief in how we will navigate the world? I’m not suggesting we be dishonorable, merely that we know why we are rigidly holding to a standard. Our why is always what we will flow to, once we get beyond the obstacle that is blocking us from proceeding there.

      “Wherever you go, there you are.” — Thomas à Kempis

      Where are we? What is holding us in this place? Sometimes it’s forces beyond our control, but usually it’s something within us. When we know what the obstacle is, we may then find a way around it. Fluidity is simply openness to change. We are here, facing this. Is this a dam or will we find a way through or around whatever is keeping us here? More change is on the way (it always is), and flow is inevitable. Are we truly open to it?

    • Pattern Breaking

      “If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow — you are not understanding yourself.”
      — Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

      Breaking from routine creates space through disruption. I write this out of ritual, and yet I am transformed by change simply by being somewhere else than I normally am. Perspective changes because there is change all around us. We can’t help but change as a result.

      That is the power of travel, or job change, or simply deciding that the routine that so firmly established our identity is simply not what we want anymore and forcefully inserting a new routine in place of the old. Pattern breaking begins when we lift our head out of the fog of routine and see where we’d rather go.

      Routine, and the rituals of habit that make up our days, deserves scrutiny. Is this who we have become? Is this where we want to be? What has a greater hold on us than our habits and routine? What leads us to something greater than awareness and the willingness to change?

      Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not insisting that you change, or even that I change. The ask here is simply to be aware of where autopilot is carrying each of us. Beyond that, the choice is ours whether the pattern suits us or not.

    • Run to Simplicity

      “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.” — Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

      Do you wonder why the most beautiful people in this world seem so placid and steady? There’s an inner calm like a still pond; clear and deep and surrounded by hushed beauty. Isn’t that something to aspire to in our own lives? Not for the shallow goal of being beautiful, but of living beautifully? Our lives must be more than a puddle in a rut, waiting for a truck to thump into us and drag our essence down the road. Get off that damned road.

      “There is nothing that the busy man is less busy with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.” — Seneca

      The thing is, we’re all so very busy and distracted by life. It’s hard to go deep on anything when we barely have a moment to understand things at a surface level. But surfaces dry up quickly when the drought comes. We’re taught to stick to the surface—to hack our way through the hard stuff, seeking shortcuts and a way out of anything that holds us back from the next. That applies equally well in our education, our work, and our relationships with others. Is it any wonder why so many are unsettled and distracted? There’s no substance to them because they keep running away from it.

      To skate through life without ever lingering long enough to truly know the world and our place in it is the path of mediocrity accepted by the masses. Choose to be the exception—for there lies extraordinary. To truly master anything in life, especially the living of life itself, requires immersion and stillness. We must learn to turn off the spigot and develop a thirst for deeper waters.

      “One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” — Bruce Lee

      I believe I keep this blog going to force myself deeper. The times when I want to simply shut it down and miss a day are when I’m running shallow—spread thin and beginning to dry up emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. I remind myself to run deeper, to eliminate distractions and to find stillness. Sure enough, the inclination fades away and I begin to write with clarity once again. Like a shallow stream building into a flowing river that steadily moves to the sea, building momentum in a deeper channel carved out of persistence.