"Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "What's There."

 A few make-you-think kind of passages from The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff:

"'A fish can't whistle and neither can I.' Coming from a wise mind, such a statement would mean, 'I have certain limitations, and I know what they are.' Such a mind would act accordingly. There's nothing wrong with not being able to whistle, especially if you're a fish. But there can be lots of things wrong with blindly trying to do what you aren't designed for. Fish don't live in trees, and birds don't spend too much time underwater if they can help it. Unfortunately, some people -- who always seem to think they're smarter than fish and birds, somehow -- aren't so wise, and end up causing big trouble for themselves and others.

That doesn't mean that we need to stop changing and improving. It just means that we need to recognize What's There. If you face the fact that you have weak muscles, say, then you can do the right things and eventually become strong. But if you ignore What's There and try to lift someone's car out of a ditch, what sort of condition will you be in after a while? And even if you have more muscle than anyone alive, you still can't push over a freight train. The wise know their limitations; the foolish do not" (p.43).

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"Sooner or later, we are bound to discover some things about ourselves that we don't like. But once we see they're there, we can decide what we want to do with them. Do we want to get rid of them completely, change them into other things, or use them in beneficial ways? The last two approaches are often especially Useful, since they avoid head-on conflict, and therefore minimize struggle. Also, they allow those transformed characteristics to be added to the list of things we have that help us out.

In a similar manner, instead of struggling to erase what are referred to as negative emotions, we can learn to use them in positive ways. We could describe the principle like this: while pounding on the piano keys may produce noise, removing them doesn't exactly further the creation of music" (pp. 58-59).

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Hirohito, 1982. [pc: © Bettmann/Corbis]

"One of our favorite examples of the value of Nothing is an incident in the life of the Japanese emperor Hirohito. Now, being emperor in one of the most frantically Confucianist countries in the world is not necessarily all that relaxing. From early morning until late at night, practically every minute of the emperor's time is filled in with meetings, audiences, tours, inspections, and who-knows-what. And through a day so tightly scheduled that it would make a stone wall seem open by comparison, the emperor must glide, like a great ship sailing in a steady breeze.

Laozi, founder of Taoism [pc: Wikipedia]

In the middle of a particularly busy day, the emperor was driven to a meeting hall for an appointment of some kind. But when he arrived, there was no one there. The emperor walked in to the middle of the great hall, stood silently for a moment, then bowed to the empty space. He turned to his assistants, a large smile on his face. 'We must schedule more appointments like this,' he told them. 'I haven't enjoyed myself so much in a long time.'

In the forty-eighth chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tse wrote, 'To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day'" (pp. 148-149).