I have a powerful tendency to gravitate to ancient wisdom—the most select goods that have stood the test of times: Tao Teh Ching, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Herakleitos, Hermes Trismegistus, Hagakure, Sun Tzu, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and very many more.
While there are stacks more ancient treasures than you can peruse let alone learn in one or five lifetimes, you do want to be open to wisdom where you find it, and in fact make a point to see what contemporary masters are up to for its own good and as a counterpoint of sorts, or really a form of echo to the classics.
Be Water, My Friend
Lee Jun-fan, who most know as Bruce Lee, was the founder of Jeet June Do, a hybrid philosophy that experts credit with paving the way for mixed martial arts. I admire that he was a physical master—and do take a look here if you’ve never seen what he could do—who also embraced the mental mastery of philosophy, and notably of both east and west.
His interest in Taoism and writing poetry are also nexus points with my own trajectory and when I found a copy of his Jeet Kun Do on my wanderings I decided to take a deeper look, and then later added Artist Of Life.
There have been a lot of quickie, ripoff type philosophy books on Lee, and many other tomes of dubious provenance and vintage. Aspiring students always need to be careful. Now we have a game-changer as his daughter Shannon Lee has published Be Water, My Friend—a fully authorized and highly handsome edition from the Flatiron imprint on Macmillan that illuminates Lee’s perception of martial arts as metaphor for personal growth and self-actualization and how to apply this into everyday life.
Am jacked to have this book upon the nightstand at CentComm during these golden, auspicious hours around solstice. I never wait like a bourgeois slave for a celibate pope’s contra-naturam calendar to restart on 1 January to make not only resolutions but real changes in will and action for the orbit I desire.
Indeed, have already implemented some huge and fundamental changes this month with the results to show.
Now Be Water, My Friend has arrived right on time to fuel my resolve, as modern wisdom will, if you are observant and honor the signs that arrive along the road.
❏