Tao Te Ching and Tai Chi - Verse 1

From now on, I'm gonna study the Tao Te Ching and publish some posts about it. I read this book many years ago, but now after practicing Tai Chi and Qi Gong intensely for many years (and after deciding to change my approach to spirituality), I've thought it was about time to read it again under a new light. The Tao Te Ching was probably written around the 6th century BC. You can read a lot about its history and its author Lao Tze on the internet (or on many books). Tao means way, Te means virtue or integrity and Ching can be translated as classic or book. So this book can be considered a guide into Living the Way of the virtue. You can find the complete 1st verse on the internet, but I like to show you the beginning and the end of it: "The Tao can that can be told is not the eternal Tao" (first part) "And the mystery itself is the doorway to all understanding" (final part). I love these two sentences and they remind me of this Tai Chi (Taiji) posture called Wuji. Wuji means nothingness, emptiness, the great void. I'm not gonna teach you how to do it, because it requires a lot of time and practice in class, but I decided to show myself doing it. I like that one of its translation is "free man". In this posture, we are still, but moving inside, ready to start something. In this posture, I've always felt relaxed and calm and the center of myself and the universe. I think this is the right position to associate with the mystery and the eternal Tao (my personal vision). I'd like to learn this lesson from this first verse: I want to enjoy the mystery in calmness and be ready to move into something great. 

The London tea theory - because when you are 20 everything tastes differently

When I was 19 I had been to London for 5 days. I remember I liked the city, the people and the smell among the streets, but one thing remained impressed: the taste of a special tea that a young woman offered me. That tea tasted like apricot, chamomile, peace and sweetness, I loved it! For years I had been looking everywhere for the same brand, taste and emotion that tea transmitted me, in those few seconds in the city of London. 

Incredibly, one day I was walking around in Trento and looking at the store windows of a small delicacy shop, I noticed something: that was my London tea, the tea I had been looking for so long, just 10 years later. I didn't have to think about it too much, I entered the place and bought the tea, end of story.

Excited, I came home looking forward to reproduce that taste, emotion and big revelation that very tea had gave me many years before. I boiled the water, added the product and waited. The smell was already alarming: was that really the tea I tasted in London? The ingredients were the same, so the brand. I drank it, kept it in my mouth for a while, looking like an old sommelier. The taste was nauseating. It was too sweet, too intense, simply not my kind. Then I remembered: that was the taste, but I was different, and yet I liked it back then. This episode made me thought a lot about the relativity of things based on age.

Is it possible that what it looks, tastes and feels great when you're 20, it's all different when you grow up? I have always thought that one thing, you love it or you hate it, forever. But now I am not so sure anymore. What if everything I thought and experienced, it was only the result of the perception I felt on that particular moment of my life? Do I have to re dimension everything I remember? Was I only too enthusiastic because I was younger?

These thoughts scared me. All the good and bad things I remember probably are only what I was when I stored that memory. I had the chance to rethink about my first boss, my first love, my spiritual view and I explored these memories only finding out that all I thought to be fantastic or horrible were neither. Things are not simply so extreme as I remembered them. I don't think I am just wiser, I rather believe that experiences are such only when you have the time to re-explore them after a couple of years and visit them as an external viewer. Of course it's no easy to admit I had been wrong most of time, or that I exaggerated some of those perceptions, but in the end I feel like this kind of analysis is going to help me control my ups and downs, to overreact less and reflect a little bit more before making life changing decisions.

I am glad I found that tea, I am glad I was so sweet and exaggerated, I am glad I was just young.