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From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 6 (Unpublished):

It is, without limit.
Like a valley, still.

Like a mystery spirit—
a well, forever full,
for heaven and earth—

in use,
inexhaustible.

—

We all recognize a moment that asks more of us than we thought we had. Sometimes it arrives suddenly. More often, it builds. One thing gives way to another, then another, until what once felt manageable begins to feel like something else entirely.

Between 2003 and 2010, life didn’t shift so much as wear me down. Two back surgeries. A divorce. A lawsuit that stretched on for years. A layoff in the middle of the financial crisis. The death of someone close. Cancer. At some point, it stopped feeling like a series of events and started feeling like a pattern I couldn’t see through.

There is a particular kind of experience that shows up in stretches like that. The usual ways of making sense of things stop holding. Effort doesn’t translate the way it used to. Even hope starts to feel conditional, tied to outcomes you no longer trust yourself to predict.

And yet something remains.

It doesn’t show up as strength in the way we usually define it. It doesn’t arrive as clarity or confidence. It’s harder to name than that, which is part of why it’s easy to miss.

There were moments I was convinced I had reached the end of what I could carry. And then more arrived. Over time, a distinction began to emerge. Not something I understood intellectually, but something I experienced directly.

There is a difference between being depleted and being empty.

Depletion feels like running out. Like there is nothing left to draw from.

Emptiness begins to open as something else. Space. Capacity. A kind of receptivity that doesn’t depend on having reserves.

That shift didn’t happen because I figured something out. It happened when I stopped trying to manufacture strength I no longer had. When that effort dropped away, something steadier became available. It didn’t resolve anything immediately. It didn’t change the circumstances. It held.

Accessible, even when everything visible suggested otherwise.

Frankl recognized something similar in conditions designed to strip human beings of everything. What he noticed was simple and difficult at the same time. What happens does not fully determine what follows. Somewhere in between, something remains available that is not governed by the event itself.

Keller encountered that same reality from a different edge. A world without sight or sound didn’t offer many openings. Still, something held. When connection came—through touch, through language—the world shifted from inaccessible to reachable.

King stood in that same kind of space under pressure that could have shaped a very different response. Violence, injustice, and provocation did not determine what he became. Something steadier held long enough for another path to take form.

Different lives. Different conditions. The same pattern.

There is what happens, and there is what we make of what happens. Most of the time, those arrive together. The event and the meaning fuse so quickly that they feel inseparable. Once they fuse, they begin shaping what comes next. A moment becomes a conclusion. A disruption becomes a direction. A loss becomes a story about the future.

At certain points, that fusion loosens. Sometimes gently. Sometimes through pressure that forces separation. When that happens, something else becomes available.

What shows up in that space has a different quality. It feels less like something we control and more like something we can access.

The Tao points to it without trying to define it. A valley that receives. A well that gives. A source that does not depend on circumstances to remain what it is.

It doesn’t remove hardship. It doesn’t rearrange outcomes. It doesn’t explain why things unfold the way they do.

It remains.

There are moments when that’s what carries the next step. No clarity. No resolution. No assurance about how things will turn out. Just movement drawn from somewhere deeper than what the situation seems to allow.

Over time, something shifts. Sometimes in the events themselves, more often in the relationship to them. What once felt like an ending begins to feel like something you moved through. What felt empty begins to reveal a different kind of fullness. It rarely announces itself. It rarely arrives all at once.

But it is there.

The well does not measure what draws from it. The valley does not choose what enters it. What remains available does not depend on how much has already been taken.

There is what happens, and there is what we make of what happens.

And beneath both, there is something that does not run out.

Here’s a Polarity Map for Stimulus AND Response:

 

INVITATIONS:

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