Why do you want to refine your hardness and turn it into softness around your fingers?

Laozi said: "To be soft is to be strong." This is another way to success revealed by Laozi. Lao Tzu said, people, people, if you keep that softness, you will become strong, strong, and powerful! Lao Tzu also said: "The weak overcomes the strong." "Weak people are born." "Weakness is the best." In weakness, I saw the lasting strength and the power of success.

Laozi Guirou expounded this idea many times in the book "Laozi". If we want to succeed, we must have the ability to achieve success through weakness. Don't be afraid of being weak, just be afraid that you won't be able to maintain your weakness. To soften hardness, you can win and be successful, always full of vitality. People always hope to grow up and become strong, which is from being weak to being strong; but if strength turns into stubbornness, or becomes aggressive, then the root of the disaster has been laid, and it is not far away from being a "disciple of death". If we dialectically understand and apply the concept of "guirou", it will also be of great value to modern people.

Observing all things from a philosophical perspective, Laozi discovered that when all things are alive, their shape is soft due to the nourishment of "life", but once they "die", their shape becomes hard , become withered. From these appearances to the deeper levels, Laozi believes: The strong are the disciples of death, the weak are the disciples of life; the strong are at the bottom, and the weak are at the top; the weakest in the world can control the hardest in the world. The book "Laozi" also said: "The soft is stronger than the strong." (Chapter 36) "The soft is stronger than the strong, and the weak is stronger than the strong." (Chapter 78) All these discussions, if you look deeper into the inside, you can see that " "Weakness" is an important category in Laozi's philosophy. It is the nature of Tao, a manifestation of the way of heaven, the truth of nature, and of course the great wisdom of life.

Why is a baby so full of life? Why is vitality so strong? Among them are the mechanisms of "softness" and "weakness". When an old person reaches the age of eighty or ninety, his bones have become stronger and his vitality has become weaker. In fact, on the surface it is "softness" and "weakness", but inside it is about the potential and potential of a kind of life. The deep layers of "softness" and "weakness" in babies contain a powerful life force.

Let’s observe some phenomena. The hardest thing in the human body is the teeth, and the softest thing is the tongue. When people age, all the teeth fall out, but the tongue remains intact. Big trees are harder and stronger than small grass, but when tsunamis and typhoons come, big trees can be knocked down or even uprooted, while small grass remains the same. A strong earthquake came. Some high-rise buildings collapsed, but some small bungalows were safe and sound. Water is the weakest and stone is hard, but water droplets can penetrate solid stone. The ants are so weak that they are insignificant, and the dam is so strong that it can compete with the torrential floods, but the weak ants can cause the dam to burst thousands of miles away. The air is the weakest, but it is pervasive. If the air is not flowing and the silence is extreme, it can corrode copper and iron that have lasted for thousands of years, and the beams and columns can be rotten; once the air is flowing to the extreme, it can fly sand and stones, and uproot houses and move hills.

And so on, countless common phenomena like this were captured by Laozi’s sensitive mind, although the truth behind it is very complicated, such as life cycle issues, object movement issues, and the environment. questions and so on, but he extracted and refined it into a philosophy, a kind of wisdom of life, which is very enlightening. Lao Tzu said: "Those who are strong will die." He therefore wants people to learn to use softness to overcome hardness, and there is firmness in softness. Steel can be tempered a hundred times, and it is a kind of steel that becomes soft around the fingers. Our general concept of educating people since ancient times is: people must be strong, strong, and tenacious. This is good, but I remind people: be weak. This is a great wisdom. Of course, for this kind of great wisdom, you have to apply it vividly and treat it dialectically. If you dive into a blind alley, it is not the wisdom of Lao Tzu. For example, one of the important ones is that Lao Tzu teaches you to find the lasting driving force of life in weakness, experience it bit by bit, step by step, layer by layer, to accumulate energy, experience, and wisdom, and finally achieve success.