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
From my Cliff’sNOTES interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1 (Unpublished).
You will see first in this Chapter and later throughout the series, that I use “It” synonymously with “Tao”):
Names fail describing Tao.
Never, always—
in all ways,
It unspoken,
It spoken,
arising together.
Nowhere, everywhere—
in everything.
Everywhere, nowhere—
in nothing.
Without grasping,
the secret reveals.
Forms appear with grasping,
meaning disappears.
Silent—chorus.
Empty—fullness.
Partness—wholeness.
Infinite—source.
Ancient, new.
Below, above.
Unseen, seen—
moving together.
It, as love moves,
without names.
For years, I was afraid to do this.
Afraid that using Polarity Thinking to “make sense” of the Tao would shrink it. Reduce it. Turn Mystery into a framework. The first line of the Tao Te Ching practically warns you not to box It in, and there I was holding a perfectly good box labeled “Polarity Thinking.” It felt like overreach at best, and at worst, corruption.
So I kept them mostly separate.
Tao in one corner of my life. Polarity Thinking in another. I’d reference them in close-knit circles, but rarely in the same breath publicly. Like two relatives I wasn’t sure should sit next to each other at dinner.
The irony isn’t subtle. I’ve spent decades helping leaders hold tensions together, and I was carefully managing my own.
A near-death mountain biking accident in 2021 put my life on pause. That slowing down and extended reflection created an opening. In the stillness came a softening realization. The Tao doesn’t shrink when you look at it through a useful lens. What shrinks is the illusion that the lens is the whole. The danger isn’t applying a model. The danger is mistaking the model for Mystery.
There’s an old saying that doctors make the worst patients and cobblers’ children have no shoes. Add this: polarity thinkers who hesitate to apply their own lens to a text that shaped them.
What shifted wasn’t brilliance. It was discomfort. I began to suspect my restraint might not be humility. It might be avoidance. By refusing to explore how Polarity Thinking could illuminate the Tao in practical ways, I may have been withholding something useful. Not because the Tao needs Polarity Thinking. It doesn’t. But because people do.
Some of us take longer to learn that than others.
When I met Barry Johnson decades ago, something inside me exhaled. I had the unmistakable sense that I’d been given language and process for what I’d been intuitively exploring and attempting to live for years. The tension between opposites. The futility of choosing one side of a dynamic that required both. The exhaustion that comes from repeatedly trying to solve what isn’t solvable, only leverageable.
Polarity Thinking didn’t replace Mystery. It honored it. It offered structure without pretending structure was ultimate. Principles. Maps. Language. Tools. Approaches. It allowed me to amplify and accelerate the work I was already trying to do in real life with leaders, teams, and large systems — not abstractly, but practically.
What mattered even more was that Barry lived it. Not perfectly — no one does — but sincerely. When he missed something, he owned it. When he leaned too far in one direction, he adjusted. Watching someone walk the talk — especially in a field that does a lot of talking — meant something to me.
As a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied male, I’ve often wished my list of men who look like me — and whom I genuinely admire — were longer – mirror included. A man like Barry — steady, thoughtful, grounded, willing to hold complexity without theatrics — was someone I could look up to without reservation. That mattered more than I knew at the time. He and his work had genuine power.
And had I not met Barry, I would not have encountered an entire community of human beings who have become some of the most beautiful souls I could have ever hoped to know. The Polarity Thinking community has enriched my life in ways that are difficult to describe without sounding sentimental. Deep friendships. Honest dialogue. Shared growth. Laughter. Humility. Accountability. Love. Real love — the kind that strengthens without suffocating and challenges without diminishing.
That community has shaped me as much as Polarity theory and Taoist mystery have.
And eventually, it brought me back to Chapter 1.
Patterns And Mystery.
As you’ve heard, I’m capable of learning enough to know that the moment I think I’ve got things figured out, I’m probably missing something — and that turns out to be less of a personal bug and more of a feature of reality.
What we can name, define, and model is only part of what’s shaping outcomes. The part we can’t fully capture doesn’t disappear just because we ignore it.
You see it in organizations all the time. Not as incompetence, but as friction. Decisions that don’t quite hold. Alignment that drifts. Trust that erodes gradually — not dramatically, but steadily. Leaders try to tighten strategy when the issue isn’t tighter strategy. It’s an overreliance on Pattern without enough reverence for Mystery.
Lean too far into Pattern and we start believing control guarantees stability. Lean too far into Mystery and we avoid responsibility when it’s time to act.
The work isn’t choosing.
It’s developing the capacity to operate with both.
Grounded enough to make a call. Open enough to adjust as conditions evolve. Not perfectly. Just wisely enough that decisions begin to hold because they were made with awareness of what can be mapped and what must be respected.
That’s what Polarity Thinking helps make practical.
Not to explain the Tao.
To help us stop gripping one side of it.
So here’s the invitation behind Chapter 1:
Where in your world are you holding the pattern so tightly that Mystery has no room to inform it?
And where might you be leaning into Mystery in a way that lets you avoid naming what can, in fact, be named?
That tension isn’t a problem to solve.
It’s the work.
(Thank you to my friend/colleague, Dr. Gemma Jiang, for encouraging me to include more of my personal story to this Chapter.)
Here’s the interior portion of a Polarity Map for Patterns And Mystery:
INVITATIONS
Take a quick self-assessment for Patterns And Mystery: CLICK HERE
NOTE: the results include Leveraging Action Steps and Early Warnings (to support maximizing upside benefits and minimizing downside limitations).
How do Patterns And Mystery show up for you right now?
Try the “AI-trained Chat w/AI Cliff for support for Step 1, Seeing Polarities
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