VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 26, SECTION 1
The Nine Things, How to Live Alongside Them
This chapter is the closing chapter of the whole second volume. Come this far, the root of the first semester and the use of the second, the stretch on education and the stretch on tools, all have to be drawn in together. Drawn in how? Not by lighting a new fire. By coming back to a thing that is the oldest of all, the nine things. They have followed along from the ninth chapter of the first semester to here, and they are the bone of this whole set of books. This lesson looks at them, hard, one last time. These nine things, how is a person to live alongside them.
Set the nine out once more. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. These nine are the whole capital of a person's one life. The first semester spoke of them as the thing not to let torment grind away. The nineteenth chapter of the second semester spoke of them as the very place that education is in. And this chapter brings them out for the last time. A person's one life is, when all is said, this. He takes these nine, and with them lives alongside this world. How you spend your time, how you use your energy, whose face your eyes are on, how you deal with people, whom you give your trust, how you treat your own body, what skill is in your hands, what faith you stand on before others, how you give your feeling. How these nine are spent is what kind of person you are, and what kind of one life you have lived.
Stare at these nine a while longer, and you will find they have one thing in common. Every one of them is limited. Your time is limited. Your energy, there is only so much of it in a day. Your attention, at any one moment, can be put in only one place. The people you can come close to, there are only so many of them in a life. Your health is a capital that is slowly spent down. Even your feeling, that store of deep feeling you have to pay out, is limited too. You cannot love a hundred people deeply at the same time. Every one of these nine is limited. And this takes up exactly the line of the twenty fourth chapter. Limit is the capital. It is precisely because these nine are all limited that how you portion them out becomes a matter of the very first weight. Were they limitless, then how they were spent would be of no matter, spend them out and there would be more. But they are limited. You gave the time to this, and so you did not give it to that. You gave the best of your energy to the work, and so you kept none for the child. You handed your attention to the screen day upon day, and so you did not put it on the faces of the people at your side. Every portioning out of every one of them is a real choosing, and every one draws a piece away from your limited capital.
See that these nine are all limited, and you can see one thing of the first importance today. That new thing, which of these does it most want to take from you? What it most wants is the first three. Time, energy, attention. The things that will not let you stop have reckoned, precisely, on these three. It wants you to spend one more minute of time, burn one more measure of energy, hand over one more measure of attention. Because these three of yours are its food. The more of them you spend on it, the better it lives. And this is the deadliest thing about the living-alongside that is going on today. Your limited first three, time and energy and attention, are being kept an eye on. There are people who, with the cleverest of methods, day and night, are reckoning how to dig them out of you, one measure at a time. And if you do not know that they are limited, do not know that they are your capital, then you will hand them out by the armful, and think all the while that you are resting, unwinding, enjoying yourself. And by the time you come back to yourself, a day is gone, a year is gone, and those first three that ought to have gone to growing a skill, to keeping a family company, to tending a body, have all been fed to the screen. And the six behind, relationships and trust and health and skill and reputation and feeling, because the first three were hollowed out, run to waste too, one after another.
So these nine, how in the end is a person to live alongside them? When all is said, it is one word. Portion. You have to know that they are limited, and so you have to portion. Like the one who keeps a household, who has only so much rice in his hand, and has to reckon as he portions it. This share into the pot, that share kept for seed, this share against an emergency. Portion it well, and the family passes a year. Portion it badly, and before half a year is out the pot is empty. Your nine things are the rice of your one life. Portion them how? This book will not hand you a table, will not tell you your time is to be split so many parts to so many. It gives you one line only. Portion the limited good things you have out to the living people and the living matters that are worthy of them and can catch them, and do not hand them out by the armful to the things that only want you hollowed. Your best energy, portion it to the people and the matters of the first weight, and not to that screen that is reckoning you. Your attention, portion it to the faces of the people at your side, and not to that endless, scrolling clamor that has nothing to do with you. Your feeling, portion it to the few who will really sit down at your sickbed, and not to that ever-fitting, bodiless it. This word, portion, is the largest lesson of a person's one life. Portioned right, the nine things each find their place, and you live in a way that stands, and is warm. Portioned wrong, the nine all fed where they should not be, and you live yourself into a hollow shell, busy a whole life, and at the end of it no skill, no close friend, a body broken down, and beside you not one single person.
The ancestors said this word, portion, all the way through. Confucius said of his own self, with coarse rice to eat and water to drink and a bent arm for a pillow, joy is to be found there too in the middle of it. And wealth and honor got by what is not right are to me as a floating cloud. See how clearly this man, Confucius, portioned the nine. Coarse rice and water, he did not feel to be bitter, because he knew that health, and a heart at ease, and that bit of joy with the people at his side, were the capital that mattered. And that wealth and honor that had to be traded for by what is not right, in his eyes, were a floating cloud, a thing not worth trading his limited capital for. It is not that he did not want wealth and honor. It is that he could reckon it clear. Some wealth and honor have to be traded for with your peace of heart, your name, your cleanness, and the price is too dear, and he would not trade. This is the highest form of portioning. To have a balance in the heart, and to know, clear and clear, what is the capital and what is the floating cloud, and then to spend the limited capital only in the places that are worth it. Twenty five centuries ago, Confucius set that balance up, there.
So here is where this section leaves us. The nine things brought out one last time. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling, these nine the whole capital of a person's one life, and a person's one life, when all is said, is his taking of these nine to live alongside the world. They have one thing in common. Every one is limited. And precisely because they are limited, how you portion them becomes a matter of the first weight. And that new thing wants most to take from you exactly the first three, time and energy and attention, because they are its food, and the first three hollowed, the six behind run to waste. How to live alongside the nine? One word. Portion. Portion the limited good things out to the living people and living matters that are worthy and can catch them, and not by the armful to the things that only want you hollowed. Confucius, coarse rice and water and joy in the middle of it, and wealth and honor got wrong a floating cloud, a balance in the heart that knows the capital from the cloud, and spends the limited capital only where it is worth it. That is the start of the twenty sixth stake. The nine are all limited, and the way to live alongside them is in the one word, portion, portioning the limited capital out to the living people and matters that are worth it. So, this portioning, where does it happen? Not in the hour of some great decision. In one tiny, tiny moment after another, so small you can barely catch it, that one half second. The next section speaks of that half second. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.