The full system contains the triumphs and the tragedies

Life is complex. Sometimes, in the midst of something horrible, we forget that life can be great. Hearing someone talk about the beauty of a flower right after being fired would be infuriating, not joyous. The pain from the firing would drown out everything else.

But life contains those horrible moments and moments of bliss. They both exist in the same system. We can’t separate them out. They coexist.

This is why I love systems thinking. Systems thinking shows this as part of a large, complex system. We see that there are many sides to the system. There are many aspects, many perspectives, many interactions with the same system.

This shows us that the great times are not as perfect as we think. Those great times exist along with those horrible moments.

The Tao Te Ching is an ancient text written 2,500 years ago. Many refer to it as the wisest book ever written. It contains great wisdom that contradicts a lot of modern thinking. It uses paradoxes to show the great complexity and the systematic tendencies of the world.

My favorite part in the Tao Te Ching is the 29th verse. At the end of the 29th verse it says that the wisest of us avoid extremes, extravagance, and the excessive. Yet, most of us daydream about opulence. We crave more money, bigger houses, fancier cars.

This ambition pushes us away from the gentle peacefulness of the Tao. It sacrifices our humility for our greed.

Wanting more isn’t evil. But to remain humble and face life’s challenges, we have to see the full system. We have to know the Tao, which translates to the “the way.”

Combining systems thinking and the Tao Te Ching, we can start to see that many of our snap assumptions of the world are incorrect. They are biased and only see one side of the system.

When we want the extremes, extravagance, and the excessive, we are expecting those to overtake the negatives in life. We assume with more money, a bigger house and a fancier car, we won’t experience the struggles and difficulties in life.

But those all exist together. The key isn’t to strive for more opulence. The key is to learn how to accept things as they are. We don’t complain about the way things are. We accept them. We learn to live in the calm peacefulness of the way it is.

I think that is much of what Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, meant when he talked about avoiding those extremes.

If we get too caught up in craving excess to try and overcompensate for those negative aspects of life, we don’t see the full system. Instead, we assume that we just need to change the system.

We feel that if God just handed us the keys, we could do much better. We would get rid of the bad and emphasize the good in life.

Here is the first section of the 29th verse of the Tao Te Ching – “Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done. Everything under heaven is a sacred vessel and cannot be controlled. Trying to control leads to ruin. Trying to grasp, we lose.”

He seems to be saying that we need to accept the world instead of trying to change it. We need to learn to appreciate the subtleties. We need to understand the complexity of the system. We need to see that the horrible moments and the triumphant moments exist together and cannot be separated. We cannot strip away the aspect of the system we dislike or we will ruin it.