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From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 39 (Unpublished):
Hold It,
Air clear.
Sky sapphire.
Water pure.
Oceans clean.
Earth green.
The living ever-existing, ever-becoming.
Depart It,
Beauty exits.
Air clouded.
Sky grey.
Water murky.
Oceans troubled.
Earth inhospitable.
Life, perpetually devalued.
Hold It, in humble hands.
Lose It, in part and whole.
—
“Hold It, in humble hands.” Whenever I read that line, I picture the difference between holding something solid and holding something alive. A stone can tolerate our grip. A living thing asks us to feel for movement, respond to change, and remember that what rests in our hands was never ours in the same way.
That image changes how I hear “the living, ever-existing, ever-becoming.” Ever-existing once suggested permanence to me—the ground that remains while everything else changes. Living systems complicate that understanding. A forest continues through seed and decay, disturbance and regeneration. A river remains a river because the water never stays. Continuity is carried through change.
The Tao leaves mystery around that movement. Something endures. Everything becomes. The whole remains inseparable from its changing parts. I can experience the truth of that relationship more readily than I can explain it. These three paragraphs took me upwards of a day to write.
The living ever-existing, ever-becoming.
You may see or name the underlying tensions differently. Normally, I find myself looking for the polarity by reading between the lines. Here, Ever-existing AND Ever-becoming is one of the lines. Ever-existing carries continuity, inheritance, identity, and the conditions that allow life to continue. Ever-becoming carries adaptation, emergence, renewal, and the capacity to respond when existing forms can no longer serve the life within them.
Each value can lose contact with the other. Ever-existing to the neglect of Ever-becoming can harden into rigidity—the effort to preserve a form after the conditions supporting it have changed. Ever-becoming to the neglect of Ever-existing can become disruption without memory, treating what came before as disposable and change itself as evidence of progress.
The living world offers little support for either separation. Clear air, oceans, forests, climate, and soil are sometimes treated as background conditions: the stable stage on which human life unfolds. Each is alive with movement, exchange, feedback, and limits. Their continuity depends upon change occurring within ranges that the larger system can absorb.
The Global Tipping Points Report 2025 gives this old recognition a contemporary edge. Its assessment of warm-water coral reefs describes a living system being pushed beyond the range within which change can still support continuity. The report concludes that the central estimate of the reefs’ thermal tipping point has already been crossed. The 2023–2025 bleaching event exposed more than 80 percent of the world’s reefs to bleaching-level temperatures. Hundreds of millions of people depend upon what those reefs make possible.
A reef has never held still. It grows, breaks, bleaches, recovers, competes, and renews. Its becoming depends upon conditions that allow it to remain a living reef. When those conditions are lost, the movement crosses a threshold. Something can continue changing and still pass beyond the point where its former wholeness can be carried.
The same report also describes positive tipping points—changes that become self-reinforcing in a more life-supporting direction. Solar and wind power have crossed positive tipping points globally, while electric vehicles, battery storage, and heat pumps have done so in leading markets. Ever-becoming can help protect the conditions we hope will keep existing. Continuity AND Change begin to look less like competitors and more like participants in the same living movement.
I encounter this relationship in work with leaders through Human Prosperity AND Planetary Health. Both values are real. Human beings need livelihoods, energy, mobility, shelter, and the dignity of participating in decisions that reshape their communities. Human prosperity also depends upon a planetary system capable of supporting life. Neglect either value long enough and the other eventually pays the price.
I felt this most concretely over ten years of work in Brazil with two colleagues at SEBRAE, Roseangela Angonese and Julio Agostini. What began as a leadership module for visiting executives grew, by 2023, into a five-city tour where government and business leaders sat down together to map Profit AND Sustainability — a polarity Julio had watched leaders misdiagnose as an Either/Or for years: officials feeling pressure to prioritize sustainability, business leaders feeling pressure to prioritize profit, the two sides rarely occupying the same room.
The last stop was Florianópolis, a city Brazilians call their Silicon Valley. Near the end of a long day of mapping, one of the technology leaders asked, fairly, whether artificial intelligence could have produced everything the room had just spent hours building — faster, and with less mess. Instead of answering him, the group spent its last five minutes doing the thing itself: sketching it out on a flip chart, an interpreter stepping out of the booth to help capture it in Portuguese. When they finished, he said, “Everything from today just came together for me in these last five minutes.” I heard that line through my headset three seconds after he spoke it — the translation always ran that far behind the room — so his words and the room’s applause reached my ears at exactly the same moment. Whatever a faster tool might have produced that day, it wasn’t that.
Polarity Thinking helps me notice the recurring pattern. The Tao keeps that pattern from becoming a complete explanation. Their relationship is reciprocal for me: the map helps reveal how Continuity And Change support one another over time; the mystery of the living world reminds me that no map can hold the whole.
Hold It, in humble hands.
Lose It, in part and whole.
Humble hands feel different from controlling hands. They pay attention to what is being held and to what the holding itself may be doing. They protect without pretending to possess. They can loosen when the life within them needs room to move. They can also remain present when release would become abandonment.
I am still learning what it means to care for what should endure while participating in changes already underway. What does the living world ask of our hands when preserving its future may require allowing some forms to change—and when changing too carelessly may cost us something that cannot be recovered?
Here’s a Polarity Map for Ever-existing AND Ever-becoming:
INVITATIONS:
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.
