I’m behind in posting here due to the end-of-the-semester crush.  Makes me think of Chuang Tzu:

Once we stumble into the form of this body, we cannot forget it.  And so it is that we wait out the end.  Grappling and tangling with things, we rush headlong toward the end, and there’s no stopping it.  It’s sad, isn’t it?  We slave our lives away and never get anywhere, work ourselves ragged and never find our way home.  How could it be anything but sorrow?  People can talk about never dying, but what good is that?  This form we have soon becomes others, and the mind vanishes with it.  How could it be called anything but great sorrow?  Life is total confusion.  Or is it that I’m the only won who’s confused? (20)

      I very much feel like I am "grappling and tangling with things" and working myself ragged.  OK, I know, it’s not coal mining.  The life of a college professor, while hectic and pressed at times, is generally fairly sweet.  So, in fact, I am not as sad as the above Chuang Tzu quote suggests, just harried.   I am a happier sort, more like this Chuang Tzu passage:

We’re cast into this human form, and it’s such happiness.  The human form knows change, but the ten thousand changes are utterly boundless.  Who could calculate the joys they promise?

And so the sage wanders where nothing is hidden and everything is preserved.  The sage calls dying young a blessing and living long a blessing, calls beginnings a blessing and endings a blessing.  We might make such a person our teacher, but there’s something the ten thousand things belong to, something all change depends upon – imagine making that your teacher! (87)

      It’s all about Way….