Never mind your Hogwarts house! What type of bender would you be? In case you haven’t seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, let me explain. In Avatar, there are four nations based on the four elements: air, water, earth, and fire. Some members of each nation can control, or “bend”, their respective element, while the Avatar can bend all four. Interestingly, each nation’s element has its own set of corresponding personality types, attitudes, or characteristics. For instance, earth benders might be more “solid” and “grounded”, while fire benders might be more passionate or unwieldy. So, I ask again, what type of bender would you be? (There’s a test online, in case you actually want to know.) For me, I figure I would be somewhere between air and water, but I lean towards water, and I’ll tell you why.

You see, one of my favourite bits of imagery in the history of world religions is that of water in the Dao De Jing. This masterwork of Daoism has a lot to say about this element, including the following:

“The highest excellence is like (that of) water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men dislike. Hence (its way) is near to (that of) the Dao.” (DDJ 8, trans. James Legge)

“There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it; – for there is nothing (so effectual) for which it can be changed. Every one in the world knows that the soft overcomes the hard, and the weak the strong, but no one is able to carry it out in practice.” (DDJ 78, trans. James Legge)

This is just a couple of examples that caught my attention, in particular the selection from chapter 78. Water is soft, formless, and adaptable; and that’s what makes it so strong. It’s a strange paradoxical truth, not uncommon to religious traditions. However, the paradox occupies a prominent place in Daoist thought through the notion of wu-wei, or action-through-non-action. That is, to put a contemporary spin on it, the idea of going with the flow of things, just like water.

This might sound like laziness, and maybe, to some people’s standards, it is. But I would prefer to categorise it as a radical acceptance, which is something I love about Daoism. I find that sometimes trying to do things actually works counter-intuitively. For example, if you want to be friends with someone, you don’t try: friendships develop outside of the analysis of human relationships, and evolve spontaneously! Or, to give another example, you can’t try to be happy, or you’ll end up unhappy by trying to be happy all of the time. There is certainly a time and ways that you can put effort into these things, but, in a weird way, striving for them can be counterproductive, much like anxiety.

Anxiety is a natural human emotion that exists as something to protect ourselves, but it often does the opposite. Anxiety can be a crippling feeling and alienate us both from ourselves as well as other people, who might want to know you but can’t see the real you under all those levels of emotional protection. Once again, this is normal. You shouldn’t feel anxious about having anxiety; but you see, that goes to show how even striving for good things might make things worse. The Daoist sage, I believe, would only say that you need to let go.

“The reason Heaven and Earth can last forever
Is that they do not exist for themselves
Thus they can last forever
Therefore the sages:
Place themselves last but end up in front
Are outside of themselves and yet survive
Is it not due to their selflessness?
That is how they can achieve their own goals.”

(DDJ 7, trans. Derek Lin)

As a final word, consider this: that to be confident means more than to be obnoxious; to be strong means more than to be aggressive. Understand that striving to control things does more to signal that you don’t control them than whatever purpose you had in mind; and instead, peace is best found in an acceptance of the ebb-and-flow of life.