If you want to be given everything,
Give everything up.
This is a line from the Tao Te Ching,
Ancient Chinese text of Taoism.
If you want to be given everything,
Give everything up.
So this came up for me in relation to an experience I had yesterday with my son.
I just thought I'd share it with you.
We went to a children's arcade kind of place,
And they had all these grabber machines where you put a token in,
You move the thing around,
And then you press it for the grabber to drop down and possibly get one of the toys or stuffed animals.
And put her in the spot and then you maybe win one of those toys or stuffed animals.
So I paid $10 and we had 18 tokens.
And we played and played and played,
And we didn't win anything.
We got close a couple times,
But when the grabber went up,
The item dropped back down.
And he was pretty disappointed.
And he wanted to play more.
And I thought about,
Okay,
Let's just play a little more until we get one.
But then I thought.
.
.
This might actually be a good opportunity for learning,
For a lesson.
That it's okay to just play.
And not get anything and not win anything,
Even though you tried and didn't get anything,
It's still okay.
And so I told him that,
And he resisted it at first,
But I was proud.
He was like,
Okay.
He was genuinely accepting of,
Maybe we'll try again sometime.
So then we go to leave and I dropped off my little tray that carried our tokens with the lady at the front desk.
And then she said,
Oh,
You didn't win anything?
And she went under the desk and she got out a little stuffed animal.
Keychain.
And she gave it to my son.
It's a little panda bear keychain.
And it was honestly better than some of the things that we were trying to get.
And I told my son that,
There you go.
I think that is the lesson of the Tao.
If you want to be given everything.
Give everything up.
We reached a point where we were genuinely accepting of not getting anything,
And that would have genuinely been okay.
Uh.
.
.
And then all of a sudden out of nowhere Here you go.
To me that felt like sort of the principle of the Tao and the wisdom of the universe.
The practice of giving everything up,
Not that you must get anything in return,
But sometimes when the hand is open.
Just something unexpected that you didn't even know you wanted.
Will come into place.
If you want to be given everything.
Give everything up.
