See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching (Unpublished):
When people see beautiful things,
Ugly things arise.
When people see good things,
Bad things are recognized.
Difficult AND Easy
Long AND Short
High AND Low
Stand beside each other.
Each comes forth from the other.
Being AND Non-Being
Give birth to one another.
Seeing this, the wise one lives differently:
Teaching without speaking.
Doing without claiming.
Holding while letting go.
Giving without possessing.
Completing the work
Without claiming the credit.
And because nothing is claimed,
Nothing is lost or denied.
—
The MRI looked worse than I expected.
Years of accumulated pressure had finally become visible in a way that was difficult to explain away intellectually. Pain had been part of the landscape for a long time. Adaptation had become normal. Push through, recover, adjust, repeat. Like most patterns unfolding gradually over years, endurance slowly began masquerading as wisdom.
Then the body entered the conversation more directly.
The body records everything.
Load. Compensation. Strain. Delay. Recovery attempts. The adjustments we make. The things we override. The patterns we normalize because they still appear functional enough to continue.
Eventually the pattern becomes visible whether we are prepared to see it or not.
Cape Town was supposed to be a celebration trip. Tracy’s 60th birthday. Her approaching retirement. Time together in one of our favorite places in the world. Instead, only days after arriving, I found myself lying in Mediclinic Cape Town dependent upon strangers for even the simplest things.
Dependence rearranges perspective quickly.
Dr. Ramanare Magampa carried a calm steadiness that settled the room without effort. Patela, the head nurse practitioner, moved with grounded competence and genuine care in a way that made trust feel easier almost immediately. The broader medical staff carried themselves similarly. Capability and humanity remained connected there.
Within hours, the distance between strangers softened.
And the conversations slowly deepened.
Between treatment, long stretches of stillness, and more reflection than I probably would have chosen voluntarily, people shared stories about South Africa. Stories about race, identity, resentment, hope, fear, possibility, and what remained unresolved beneath the surface of everyday life.
The past still carried movement inside those conversations.
Lying there, I could feel echoes of the same pattern unfolding internally.
Human beings naturally reach toward clearer categories, stronger certainty, cleaner definitions, and more stable conclusions. The mind wants reality to become understandable enough that suffering feels preventable and complexity feels containable.
The Tao keeps returning to a more difficult relationship with reality than that.
Knowing distinguishes, categorizes, measures, predicts, diagnoses, and gives us something concrete to act upon. Wonder remains in relationship with what exceeds complete certainty. Knowing moves action forward. Wonder keeps action connected to humility.
The tension matters.
The moment we name something as good, conditions emerge for what is not-good to appear beside it. As long as both remain visible, discernment remains possible. Over time, partial truths can harden into identities, ideologies, and systems that lose relationship with the larger whole they originally existed to serve.
Then the pattern begins repeating.
People organize around what they name. Systems reinforce what they reward. Groups align around shared certainty. Eventually the larger purpose holding the tension together recedes while the pole itself becomes the focus.
Justice becomes the purpose. Mercy becomes the purpose. Freedom becomes the purpose. Authority becomes the purpose. Power becomes the purpose.
Each carries value. Each addresses something real. Each destabilizes systems when isolated from the others long enough.
History often repeats through patterns of overidentification more than through identical events.
Most people are not consciously pursuing destruction. More commonly, they remain devoted to values that once served life while gradually losing relationship with the larger purpose those values originally supported.
Justice to the neglect of Mercy punishes without restoring.
Mercy to the neglect of Justice leaves harm unresolved.
Claiming Power to the neglect of Sharing Power concentrates control.
Sharing Power to the neglect of Claiming Power weakens the capacity to interrupt harm.
These are interdependent goods.
And once interdependent goods lose relationship with one another, certainty gradually reorganizes reality around itself.
The deeper challenge has less to do with intelligence than relationship to complexity itself.
Without ongoing relationship to the larger purpose holding tensions together, partial truths begin functioning as complete truths.
You can feel this pattern in religion when belief disconnects from humility. You can feel it in nations when pride loses relationship with self-examination. You can feel it in organizations when performance separates from humanity. You can feel it online when fragments of truth become powerful enough to organize identity while drifting further from complexity itself.
The same pattern increasingly appears inside artificial intelligence systems.
AI dramatically expands human capacity for Knowing: prediction, optimization, analysis, simulation, information retrieval, persuasive influence, and speed itself.
All useful. All incomplete alone.
Wonder asks different questions.
What remains outside the frame?
What human consequences resist measurement?
What happens when optimization outruns wisdom?
What happens when systems become increasingly capable of influencing behavior while remaining indifferent to human maturity?
What happens to democracy when certainty scales faster than discernment?
Truth AND Trust increasingly feels foundational underneath all of it.
Truth separated from Trust becomes performative, weaponized, selectively manipulated, or dismissed outright. Trust separated from Truth becomes tribal, conspiratorial, emotionally reactive, and highly vulnerable to manipulation itself.
Healthy systems require both.
South Africa understood something profound about that tension.
After decades of apartheid and systemic harm, the country carried more than enough justification for vengeance, punishment, and permanent fragmentation. Another possibility struggled into existence alongside Justice itself:
Truth AND Reconciliation.
Truth remained necessary. Reconciliation remained necessary. Neither could create a sustainable future independently.
The larger purpose mattered.
Preserving the possibility of a future where people could continue living together without endlessly reproducing the conditions that created the suffering in the first place changed the nature of the conversation itself.
Purpose reorganized the tension.
The Tao continues returning to this repeatedly.
Knowledge matters. Discernment matters. Naming matters. Though certainty accelerates quickly whenever Knowing loses relationship with Wonder. Then systems begin organizing around the part while losing relationship with the whole.
The implications are philosophical, developmental, organizational, societal, democratic, and increasingly technological all at once.
South Africa understood something leaders navigating AI increasingly need to understand too:
Human development and systems development remain inseparable over time.
Inner development AND outer impact evolve together.
That realization feels considerably less abstract to me now than it once did.
Chapter 76 explores this through the body directly because eventually the body stopped allowing abstraction to remain theoretical.
By the time Cape Town happened, you would think I might have already learned this lesson. Five years earlier, I fractured my C2 vertebrae, experienced an arterial dissection, and sustained a traumatic brain injury. That experience changed plenty of things. Though apparently the deeper pattern still had momentum.
It takes some people longer to figure things out. I appear to be one of them. I’ve spent decades helping leaders, teams, organizations, and democracies recognize polarities while simultaneously over-leveraging Strength to the neglect of Flexibility in my own body and life. The cobbler’s children may genuinely have no shoes. Which probably explains why the original title for this series was almost: World’s Worst Taoist. (A close colleague talked me out of this Series Title.)
And maybe that carries its own form of wisdom too.
Human beings often understand realities intellectually long before those realities become embodied enough to reshape how we actually live. The Tao rarely seems learned once. More often, it reappears through consequences.
Repeatedly.
Knowing matters.
Wonder helps Knowing remain responsive.
The Tao does not discourage discernment, science, strategy, knowledge, or action. The invitation feels more connected to remaining in relationship with what exceeds certainty itself. Remaining connected to what our answers are serving.
From there, a different quality of participation becomes possible.
Less attached to securing one side permanently. Less driven to force resolution where stewardship is required instead. More capable of remaining responsive to what is still unfolding.
Because wiser decisions rarely emerge from certainty alone.
They emerge through relationship with reality over time.
Decisions serving now AND later.
Part AND Whole.
Truth AND Trust.
Humanity AND Technology.
Decisions that stand the test of time.
Here’s a Polarity Map to help see the pattern of Knowing And Wonder:
INVITATIONS
How do you make decisions under uncertainty, over time? To take a short Polarity Assessment based on the Knowing And Wonder polarity, CLICK HERE
NOTE: the results include Leveraging Action Steps and Early Warnings (to support maximizing upside benefits and minimizing downside limitations).
To use an AI-trained “Chat w/Cliff” for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.
