We’re in the habit of choosing sides. Profit OR Planet. Progress OR Tradition. Human Wisdom OR Artificial Intelligence. My people OR Your people. Much of the exhaustion surrounding modern life seems connected to this reflex of forcing reality into choices that cannot hold for very long. Again and again, we attempt to solve tensions that continue returning because they were never problems in the first place. They were interdependencies asking something more demanding from us than victory over the other side.

Just Tao It emerged from that recognition, though I would not have described it that way when I first encountered the Tao Te Ching in 1987.

I was twenty-seven years old, sitting in a bookstore I can still remember clearly. Wood floors. Narrow aisles. The smell of old paper lingering in the air. My inherited faith tradition felt unstable at the time. Certainty had begun thinning out beneath me, though I lacked language for what was happening. The Tao Te Ching did not resolve that uncertainty for me. What it offered instead was companionship inside it. There was something deeply relieving about encountering a text that did not demand rigid conclusions in order to remain meaningful. It seemed possible to remain thoughtful without becoming cynical, and open without dissolving into confusion. The Tao felt less like explanation and more like orientation. Something enduring beneath the surface of things.

For many years, the Tao remained largely private in my life. I continued working on my own interpretations of the chapters, less as scholarship and more as an ongoing reflective practice. Those interpretations eventually became part of this series. Then, in 2006, I met Barry Johnson, and something that had existed primarily as contemplative experience suddenly found practical expression inside leadership, organizational development, and executive coaching.

Barry’s work on polarity thinking gave structure to patterns I had sensed for years but could not yet fully articulate. He had spent decades helping leaders and organizations recognize that many recurring struggles emerge from mismanaging interdependent tensions over time. Some realities do not disappear through resolution. They require ongoing participation, discernment, adjustment, and humility. That distinction changed the way I understood organizations, leadership, conflict, and eventually myself.

I began seeing recurring patterns everywhere. Teams oscillating between control and chaos. Organizations swinging between rigid structure and reactive change. Leaders overidentifying with confidence while losing humility, or collapsing into uncertainty while avoiding responsibility. The Tao had already introduced me to paradox and interdependence. Polarity thinking helped me recognize how those dynamics moved through real systems under real pressure.

Over time, these two streams increasingly converged for me. The Tao Te Ching seemed deeply attentive to Mystery — the dimensions of life that resist total capture through language, certainty, or control. Polarity thinking illuminated recurring Patterns — the ways interdependent tensions predictably behave over time. Patterns AND Mystery. I no longer experience these as competing ways of understanding reality. Human beings seem to need both. Without Pattern, experience can become vague and difficult to translate into meaningful action. Without Mystery, life becomes overmanaged, flattened, and increasingly disconnected from humility, wonder, and depth.

That tension feels especially important now.

Artificial intelligence is dramatically amplifying humanity’s capacity to identify, analyze, predict, and optimize patterns at extraordinary scale. Yet human life still contains dimensions resistant to full quantification: moral discernment, presence, grief, wisdom, love, trust, meaning, conscience, responsibility. We are generating Pattern at technological speed while human discernment continues developing at human speed. That gap matters, especially if institutions begin confusing what can be measured with what ultimately matters most.

This is part of why I continue returning to the Tao. The Tao repeatedly resists premature certainty. It cautions against confusing names for reality itself. My rendering of Chapter 1 begins with four words: “Names fail describing Tao.” Language matters. Models matter. Frameworks matter. But they remain partial. The moment human beings become overly certain that reality has been fully captured, something important usually begins slipping away.

This also shapes why I often use the word “It” throughout this series. Partly it reflects the limitations of language itself. Partly it resists the human tendency to convert living realities into rigid ideological possession. In the polarity thinking world, we often describe our work as a process of clarifying values and language over time. That feels deeply connected to the Tao. Both ask human beings to pay attention to how perception itself is shaped and how easily certainty narrows awareness.

As this series unfolds, I will continue exploring these intersections through lived experience, leadership, organizational life, and the tensions shaping human systems in an increasingly accelerated world. The early chapters revolve around tensions that have remained especially useful to me over the years: Effort AND Ease. Hold On AND Let Go. Power AND Love. Strength AND Flexibility. Knowing AND Wonder.

Far from mastering them, I continue getting caught by them. Most days I still feel the pull toward overcontrol, urgency, defensiveness, exhaustion, or the desire for certainty strong enough to silence ambiguity. The work remains ongoing. Which may be part of the point.

The Tao was written during a period of fragmentation, instability, and competing claims about how society should function. That does not feel entirely unfamiliar now. Perhaps this is one reason the text continues resurfacing across centuries. Human beings continue searching for ways to remain thoughtful, grounded, and humane while living inside conditions that resist simplicity. That search feels increasingly important in an age shaped by systems rewarding speed, reaction, certainty, and continuous acceleration.

This series is simply an attempt to remain in conversation with those tensions a little more honestly. To remain steady without becoming rigid. Open without losing direction. And maybe, over time, to participate a little more wisely in realities that refuse to become simple.

Invitations:

Want to explore your Patterns And Mystery? Try  the Chat w/AI Cliff for support for Step 1, Seeing Polarities

Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Check out our online self-directed Basics, Credentialing, or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge!   Certifications and Courses

If you’re new to the Tao Te Ching, here’s an on-ramp to Meet “It” — Introduction, Part II.

Go to Chapter 1 of Just Tao It