The Tao/Dao Fish. Some preliminary thoughts.

 They were saying something indeterminate in the Tao/Dao about the fish.

So imagine a fish, maybe even a tuna.  A saltwater fish, swimming happily around the ocean.

The fish is like, "what?"

Isn't worry something you only describe with singular words that mean the same thing as worry?

Synonyms, in other words, like anxiety, consternation, a certain tightening of the butthole.  Its a state of mind, in fact, where we are just as alive as ever, yet we can feel our body turning into dust, moment by moment, with a kind of shadow over the heart and a kind of innate fear as of being prey in the wild.  We could fear ourselves dying, and the anxiety would be pressing on us, shortening our lives ever the more, increasing the pressing of time.

In order to shed worry, we might lean on human understanding, or even animal understanding, as if we expected the fish to point a fin towards an understanding of life.  Point out something, anything, to soften our concern over our finite amount of time and its continual wasting away.

The fish, with his big eyes, as if someone had just rammed a thumb in his buttcrack, looks at us, as if to say, "no one has ever explained the riddle of life, but you expect still, here and now, and if not now, any subsequent moment, an explanation might flop into view."

Or if not now, would we hold a cuckhold's hope of getting a feeling of meaning before the end?

The Dao gives us a sense of the matter, and not a clear set of definitions or measurements.

We can say, as Seneca the Stoic said, that we are partakers of life, and not experts, and in the sharing of our observations, we speak from the experience, but not exactly any sort of real knowledge, and definitely not access to a hidden knowledge.

Even the Christians say the core salvation message of their Gospel is a mystery.  We can sense it, believe it, feel it, and yet not truly understand the magnitude of eternity, or our shedding of eternity, until the end.

The bio-terrorist Doctor Manhattan said that each person, each being, was a thermodynamic miracle.  And we, as finite beings, my friends, cannot understand this miracle.

The fish and the ocean.

The ocean hums in our eyes, but never tells its secrets, and of the fish?  The fish only tells his secrets to his baby momma, and even then, only exchanged for sparing moments here and there, moments that seem important until they are gone, just as each of the fish in the other's eyes seems entirely important until after the brief little transaction.

The existential clapping of hands.

In a desert, we would wish away the world to get water.  And in water and far from the comfort and certainty of the shore, we would wish away the water for the sake of dry land.  In the end, the pleasure of the experience is finally lost and forgotten.

So then there is only the fish, darting here and there, turning this way and that, swimming a bit a making a few more side diversions, attention prepetually focused, and nothing of substances but sick crickets to speak of.

To say near the end of a long life, "the time is wasted" is to begrudge and belittle the dignity of life, the sanctity of life, and the glory of the experience observed by one soul, remembering that a comic book character said each conscious life is a miracle.

That is the tao.  An indeterminate totality.  Not just the contents, but the bag too.