"So, what's it like to work there?"

Recently, while at work, I learned the phrase: 道可道，非常道... dao4 ke3 dao4, fei1chang2 dao4.

Three of us, foreign and non-foreign coworkers working together to reach a consensus, arrived at a kind of conflated translation of the expression which we loosely came to understand as a kind of reflection or meditation on the underlying tenants defining the core principles of Taoism. To quote a coworker from an unrelated department:

"It is as if everything you know and have learned, you have discovered to not be true. No, maybe this is not right... It is like everything is different and in the end becomes something... different."

--Oh, so you mean it means like, it expresses that you can't trust anything you've ever learned? And that everything you know, and have learned, is just a part of your own personal environment.

"Oh, no. It's a very difficult thing to translate. Let me check online."

(nearly half an hour later...)

"道可道，非常道... It means like everything you know is not necessarily true..."

--I... think, I understand...

This is what it's like to work here: 道可道，非常道. The Way is The Way, that's exactly what It is. The Way. No matter what happens--absurd directives from higher-ups, common knowledge that the office is more like a Fantasy Camp that an actual company--it happens. It just does.

You either get used to that, or... (as I recently experienced) ... you go a little mad. Lucky me that it happened as I "knelt at the foot of the Buddha", that is, if Buddha were Klamm.

To quote my immediate superior during a discussion concerning our future affairs:

"It doesn't matter what you say or what you do... that's as good as it gets."

Or, in other words:

Your world can be turned upside-down, over and over again, doesn't matter how many times, but that doesn't matter. Gravity is always pointing in the same direction.

Everything eventually changes in some way, thus change is a fixity.


Total Information Awareness