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Seeking That Which Was Lost THEFLOW
On Holding Lightly Through the Layers of a Life
The first volume of the continuation, written from time that was not promised.
I was given a year. I have had eleven.
It is not a continuation of The Book of Yalun. That work is finished. It said what it needed to say. It was written, as you both know, against a clock that did not turn out to keep its own time. I was given a year. I have had eleven. Whatever I write now, I write from the other side of a deadline that did not arrive, and I want to be careful not to write as if it had. The Book of Yalun was a transmission. This is something different. This is a conversation.
You are entering, or are about to enter, a part of your lives that I have already walked through. You will both, I hope, become parents in your own time. When you do, you will discover what every parent discovers and what no one can quite be told in advance. That the self you spent your whole adolescence and your whole adulthood building is now required to move differently. To bend where it once stood. To soften where it once held. To find a kind of strength that is closer to water than to stone.
Four voices, one current
The book walks with four voices that never heard of one another, separated by languages, continents and centuries. Written for the parent stage of life, it listens for what they share.
A boy of eight or nine hears his hero stop fighting and start talking about water, and does not understand it for twenty years.
One opening sentence, read perhaps a thousand times, and the whole book it opens.
Laozi told you to be water. Zhuangzi told you to be a turtle in the mud.
Ecclesiastes, read not as despair but as one of the great consolations in scripture.
Bruce Lee said, be water. Laozi said, the Way that can be named is not the eternal Way, and the named is the mother of the ten thousand things. Zhuangzi said, do not fight the river, and do not be the ox on the way to the altar, and do not weep too long for what was given to you for a while and has now been given back. The Teacher of Ecclesiastes said, everything is mist, and the proper response is to eat your bread and drink your wine and love the people you love while they are with you.
Be blood, my friend
S Y Kelake (Shīfù Yǎlún)
This reflection was first written into The Book of Yalun, the gathered work that preceded this one. It belongs in this book also, because the move from water to blood is the move that the parent stage of life makes. Water is the universal element. Blood is the personal one. The Daoist water, the Bruce Lee water, the water of Chapter One, is the wisdom that runs through everything. The blood is the wisdom as it runs through your particular body, and your particular family, and the particular people you love. The two are not different teachings. They are the same teaching, met at different points in a life.
Be blood, my children. Let it flow. The current is older than the cruelty, and the current outlasts it. The current is what we share with every other person on this earth, including the ones who do not yet recognise that we share it with them. They will, eventually, or their children will, or their children's children will. The blood is patient. The flow continues.
Three movements
Nine chapters and a reflection, each under a single character. Meant to be read slowly, a chapter at a time, and put down between chapters.
Foreword: Time That Was Not Promised
The Current
- 水Be Water
- 血Be Blood, My Friend
- 道The Way That Cannot Be Named
- 庄The Crooked Tree, the Butterfly, the Reed
The Weather of a Parent's Life
- 无为Wu Wei in a Kitchen at Six in the Morning
- 轻Hold Lightly
- 阴Yin Remembered
What the Times Cannot Change
- 虚Meaningless
- 丝Different Voices, Same Thread
- 孝Honour as Evolution
A closing letter
Wu wei in a kitchen at six in the morning
Most of what follows in this book happens in places like this one. A kitchen, at six in the morning, with the light only just starting to come into the windows and the rest of the house still asleep. There is a kettle. There is a person standing in front of it, waiting for it to boil. The day has not begun, exactly, but it is no longer night either. There is a pause that opens up at this time of the morning that does not exist at any other point in the day, and the pause is the subject of this chapter.
The person at the kettle is a parent. The pause will not last long. Within twenty minutes, perhaps thirty if the parent is lucky, a small voice will start calling from upstairs, or a door will open, or a cat will appear, or whatever the particular form of the day's first claim happens to be. The pause is the last unstructured time the parent will have until the children are in bed, possibly fifteen hours later. The kettle clicks. The parent pours. The parent stands at the kitchen window and looks out at whatever is out there, holding a cup, and breathes.
This chapter is about that breath.
Wu wei in the morning is the discipline of refusing to fight phantoms. It is the discipline of standing in the actual kitchen, in the actual hour, with the actual cup, and letting the actual day arrive when it does. It is not passivity. It is the most active thing a parent can do. It is choosing, with full attention, to be present to what is happening rather than to what might happen.
About this edition
- Title
- The Flow: On Holding Lightly Through the Layers of a Life
- Author
- S Y Kelake BSc (Hons) · 师父克雅伦
- Series
- Seeking That Which Was Lost, the first volume of the continuation
- Contents
- A foreword, three movements of nine chapters, a reflection in verse, and a closing letter
- Length
- About 28,000 words, ebook
- For
- The parent stage of life, and anyone learning to bend where they once stood