LIFE LESSONS AND HISTORY

How a single vertical line in a Chinese ideogram changes everything

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Photo by Natalie Dmay@Pexels

Right in the Mouth of a Bottle

Pooh?

If I knew how to pronounce the traditional ideogram for ‘uncarved wood’ in Chinese, I would have spoken more confidently back when I simplified a thousand years of philosophy in just a second.

Sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in Warsaw, Poland, I took a single peanut out of the bag and tossed it in the air across the room. It went right into the mouth of the empty bottle atop the desk.

With that as my explanation of the Tao worked from my perspective, I probably left both of them a bit surprised.…