forty eight

one cannot think crooked and walk straight.

in the Tao of Pooh I found a few life lessons.

things are as they are.
everything has its own function. when you know and respect your own inner nature, you know where you belong. you also know where you don’t belong.

recognize what’s there.
we all have certain limitations and we know what they are. act accordingly. there’s nothing wrong with trying, but there can be lots of things wrong with blindly trying to do what you aren’t designed to do. that doesn’t mean we need to stop changing and improving. the wise know their limitations.

act smart.
we don’t know everything. we don’t really need to know. recognize the inner nature. work with things as they are.

follow the way of self-reliance.
recognize who we are. what we’ve got to work with. what works best for us. we will discover things we don’t like about ourselves. then we can decide what we want to do with them. do we want to get rid of them completely? change them into other things? or use them in beneficial ways?

the wise are who they are.
work with what you’ve got. do what you can do. each of us has something special. there are things about ourselves that we need to get rid of or change. we do not need to be too ruthless or combative. along the way to usefulness and happiness, many of those things will change themselves and the others can be worked on as we go. but we need to trust our own inner nature and not lose sight of it. inside each of us is something special, and that we need to keep.

peace.