From time to time I’m asked when or how my “path to polarity” began and because I’m a consultant and executive coach my answer is, “it depends” (in this case, on when you start counting).
In one sense my path is the same as everyone’s — we’re all on our polarity path — trying to leverage: Self and Other; Continuity and Change; Assertive and Cooperative; Doing and Being, etc. In that way, conscious experience is our common polarity teacher.
That said, the main contributor to my Gladwell 10,000-Hour Rule started in earnest around 1987 when I stumbled across a ragged copy of the Tao Te Ching in a free book bin. It changed me. I started collecting other versions. Many, including my favorite versions had big differences, so I set out to create my own “Cliff’s Notes on the Tao Te Ching” summary version from my most favorite of favorite versions. About the time I felt complete with that process, it was bugging me that the original in Chinese was in poetry and I hadn’t once come across an English poetic translation/interpretation. That was the seed for the next version, which converted my hard-won summary into a poetic form. It was challenging not messing up my original in that process.
In 2006, I met the modern day Lao Tzu, Barry Johnson. That friend/colleagueship kicked-off several 10,000-Hour “paths to polarity,” connected me to partners at Polarity Partnerships, our many Partners/Strategic Partners in polarity work, and to a growing Polarity Learning Community. It’s a phase that continues to this day and has been the most exciting and rewarding of all of them — words being incapable to capture the depths of that gratitude.
Lately, I’ve been in a process of rediscovering and re-integrating these strings from my path, and re-experiencing them in the context of current my life/work passions and curiosities. Thanks for indulging me in my sharing of my re-experience of the Chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching.
I learned a ton about the yin/yang energy polarity in both studying/writing processes of “Cliff’s Notes on the Tao Te Ching: a Poetic Reinterpretation of Lao Tzu’s Masterpiece.” I haven’t published that work, but an early version of Chapter 1 was published in a 2010 book entitled “The Love.” I find that chapter most interesting because Lao Tzu (if “he” was a single author, which I and true scholars have doubts about) says, “the Tao can’t be described” — and he then goes on to try to describe it. My “new improved” Chapter 1 is below and I take the approach of referencing the Tao as “It”, which is why I capitalize “It”. Here it is. Hope you enjoy:
Names fail describing Tao
Never and always It is — all, nil, and how
It is nowhere, everywhere, in everything
It is everywhere, nowhere, in nothing
It is the secret awaiting
It is the discovery experiencing
Silent, Its chorus
Empty, Its fullness
Part, Its wholeness
Infinite, Its source
Ancient new
Truest true
Below and above
The love that is love
(NOTE: This is the most perfectly impossible chapter anyone can attempt capture – success is failure. If you begin seeing that to which the words are pointing – that is success.)
