I’ve been busy the last couple of days.  Teaching demands time, and an extra presentation to the international studies colloquium here today demanded a bit more.  Administrative business, too, steals my attention.  Oh well, let me just offer a passage from Chuang Tzu.  You’ll notice that it offers solace, promising that if we open ourselves to the inevitable and humanly-uncontrollable movements of Way we will "never lost our joy."  This is important, and other moments like it can be found in Chuang Tzu.  It pushes against the idea that Taoism seems to require complete emotional detachment, a thoroughgoing denial of virtually all human emotion, good and bad.  It suggests the possibility of happiness as a "natural" condition in Way.  And why not think about that on a nice, Spring day…

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold – such are the transformations of this world, the movements of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we’ll never calibrate what drives them.  So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder the spirit’s treasure-house?  If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you’ll never lose your joy.  And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you’ll invest all things with spring.  (75)