All is One
“Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life. “
— Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
I take cold showers these days.
In the moment before I get in, my skin recoils.
“Why be afraid of cold water?” I ask. “Do you think the water is afraid that your skin is too warm?”
‘Superficial differences between men conceal a profound unity.”
— Claude Levi-Strauss
I spent my birthday in Dubai.
First time, mind blown. Young, diverse, optimistic.
On a day trip to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, I entered a small dark gallery and was instantly electrified.
Before me, illuminated in the darkness, lay hundreds of ancient Torahs, Bibles, and Qu’rans. Among them, treasures: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a first-edition Gutenberg Bible, a folio of the Blue Qu’ran.
Crafted mostly by hand and prayed to for centuries — in many cases, millennia — each relic radiated with spiritual energy.
The exhibit’s curation was superb, and its message unsubtle: that while the three foundational texts of monotheism all tell different stories in different languages, and have had different influences on culture, civilization, and history, they are nonetheless united by a vastly greater transcendental bond: the human soul’s yearning for connection with its creator.
An even smaller, even darker room holds the final installment, simply titled “The Unseen.” It imagines the eternal sublime — God, the divine — as a black hole: a force so immense that light itself — even the light of human reason — is utterly subsumed. Through meditation and prayer, we gaze into the unseen within us, approaching first-hand the universal mystery that no text, however holy, can ever truly illuminate.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to be folded anywhere,
because where I am bent and folded, there I am a lie.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
When I gaze within, I float above.
My own meditation takes me up, above the clouds, to where atmosphere meets space, where light meets dark, to a vacuum of the body and mind — a perfect emptiness in which all is one.
Gravity is gone, and my face muscles relax; in fact, all of my muscles relax, and I realize how tense and tired I have been simply from lugging my body up and around through solid air all day.
Above it all, I can unfold.
There is no air here, and I don’t need to breathe; the heavy bellows in my chest are relieved. My internal state and external environment are in equilibrium; the pressures of being are not extinguished, but equalized.
I can circulate, or be still.
There is no ambition, no surrender. There is nothing to struggle for, or against, or toward, or away from. Past, present, and future mingle casually. The boundaries of time and space dissolve.
The Way gave birth to one.
One gave birth to two.
Two gave birth to three.
Three gave birth to all things.
All things carry yin and yang
And through breathe find harmony.
Chapter 42, Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu
Back in China now, we practice tai-chi in the park.
Our teacher’s movements are agile, elegant, strong. Our own, less so.
“Start slow” he tells us, his hand patiently gliding. “When you’ve mastered slow, you can go fast.” A sharp thrust. “The strength is in the softness.”
One translation of tai-chi is the “supreme polarity”; thus the yin-yang, the fast-slow, the soft-hard. It’s never one or the other, nor a blended average of the two; each facet of each duality is distinct, yet harmonic.
Parallels abound, of course: in business, marriage, parenting, life.
Where do we focus our focus?
Product or sales? Process or outcome? Family or firm? Local or global? Long-term or task-at-hand?
Should I be pushing myself harder to get this tai-chi move right? To grow my company? To be a better father and husband? To exercise my body or my spirit or my mind?
Or is “the way” simply to think less, love more, go with the flow?
To surrender.
I was taught a month ago
To bide my time and take it slow
But then I learned just yesterday
To rush and never waste the day
Now I’m convinced the whole day long
That all I learn is always wrong
And things are true that I forget
But no one taught that to me yet
— Character Zero, Phish
Essence is learning her first dichotomies!
Big/little, happy/sad, clean/dirty, bunny/no-bunny.
We’re proud, of course, watching her describe her world.
But it’s a bittersweet pride. She’s learning to classify the world as adults do, lumping things into positives and negatives, mines and yours, goods and bads.
Before we know it she’ll be swept up in all the same bullshit as the rest of us: left/right, US/China, Trump/no-Trump, pro-this/anti-that… I’m tired for her just thinking about it.
So what’s a Daoist daddy to do?
I have no choice but to teach her the language of dichotomy, because yin and yang are distinct.
Differences do exists: a Torah is not a Bible is not a Qu’ran. There may be strength in softness, but the concepts are not one and the same.
But she must also learn that all things were borne of three, were borne of two, were borne of one, was borne of the Way — the Unseen, universal, divine.
She must learn to both recognize and dissolve the false boundaries — between self and others, between macro and micro, between past and present/future — that divide and alienate what exists naturally in harmony.
I have my own trick for putting dichotomy in its place.
I imagine every concept, feeling, or belief as a mahjong tile. My minds’ eye admires it, intricate and flawless and smooth.
Then I flip it over.
There is always a flip-side; an antithesis to every thesis. I examine this other side of the tile—it holds none of the same information, but lo! it is just as flawless and smooth.
Anything can be flipped around, without compromising its logic or integrity. In fact, only when you clearly see something’s opposite can you truly understand the thing itself — thus the popular exercises of “steel-manning” an opponent’s position, or of doing “shadow work” to illuminate one’s own psyche.
Remember, the water is no colder than your skin is warm.
(There is a deeper and truer level still, in which we see the flip-side of the tile not as an antithesis, but as a non-being; not as an opposite, but as an emptiness. The flip-side of Jon is not some antagonistic doppelganger or Bizarro Jon; it is simply my own non-existence. The flip-side of hot is not cold; it is temperature-less-ness. Whatever icon appears on the face of a mahjong tile, its flip-side is inevitably blank.)
Anyway, you can dichotomize at any level you like — the point is it’s a tile.
Now, any one particular dichotomy is unlikely to be profound in and of itself — tight/loose, passive/aggressive, Jon/not-Jon… sure, so what?
You don’t play mahjong with just one tile.
Rather, each dichotomy is a building block of bigger, more complex structures — the day-to-day tensions and dynamics of being.
Our businesses. Our relationships. Our lives — it’s dichotomy tiles all the way down.
They stack on one another, endlessly, into towering helixes, buzzing with tense energy. Higher and higher the dichotomies stack, twisting into long thrumming threads of polarity. Zoom out further and watch as the threads interweave into cables, taut with drama; zoom out again, and the cables connect into complex webs, intricate quilting, a cosmic embroidery.
Perhaps the perceived duality of our universe — maya — is all just a hand-knit tea cosy for a pot in God’s kitchen. Each dichotomy — which we agonize over so bitterly — but a fraction of a stitch in a doily divine.
Yes, the tensions can terrify; yes, we recoil from the cold.
But breathe in, and marvel at the magnificence of the greater creation, however mundane… breathe out, and cherish each bi-chrome building block, each flawless two-sided tile.
Your skin absorbs the very water it feared.
Whatever god you worship, it is this tense unity that makes the holy hum.
Okay thanks for indulging me on the meditations; here’s the raw data update.
We moved back to China in April, after a full three years away.
Hong Kong was fun but short-lived. Certain aspects exceeded expectations, but honestly it was never going to be home. Four months of dim sum, ferries, masks, and malls were enough. We moved back to Sydney in 2022.
Sydney was heaven; but a heaven too far from everything and everyone we love. We are deeply grateful for the time we spent in Australia — a perfect place to get married and have a baby and ride out a pandemic — but too disconnected from the global economy to spend our lives there.
When China reopened early this year, we packed up and came home.
We didn’t return to Beijing, though, the harsh mistress of my youth — rather, to the green embrace of Guangzhou, where my in-laws are based for business purposes. None of us are from here originally — we are all fairly unfamiliar with the city and have few friends to show us around. What we do know is all very pleasant — delicious food, lush landscaping, and lots of open space to run around and explore.
The conveniences of modern China — cheap domestic help and transport, instant delivery of anything at anytime, not to mention the boon of babysitting from eager and loving grandparents — have left my wife and I awash in gratitude and amazement. Saturday night dinner date for two, followed by a movie or a massage — what a change from our days washing breast pumps in lockdown!
We live a good life here.
Essence is the star of the show, of course. She is just a dream of a child, a great friend, and a lovely human being.
She’s two-and-a-half now; no longer a baby, not yet a girl.
She walks, she talks, she tells jokes, she has friends. She has opinions. She has taste. She has an agenda. She has a platform.
Her smile is infectious, angelic, and constant.
It’s like she has little battery packs tucked somewhere in her face that keep her eyes bright and lips smiling and cheeks kissable all day, every day — the Energizer Bunny of smiles.
Speaking of bunnies, this girl loves bunnies. She’s had a bunny by her side since the day she was born, though that bunny has since taken many forms — avatars of a single bunny god.
Essence is comically sensible, almost conservative. Her mom and dad are a pair of jokers; she is the family’s chief compliance officer and head of risk management.
“Slowly!” she cautions me as we cross the street. “There are bikes. Be careful!”
“No dinosaurs, Baba,” she tells me. “Too scary.”
Some parents have to spend all day making sure their kids don’t light the house on fire; we spend ours trying to prank our girl into growing more of an edge.
Goad as we might, she just does her thing.
And at the end of the day, there is simply no peace, no happiness, no comfort or joy that can compare with holding her in my arms. Forget breathe or meditation or harmony itself —all I live for is to hear her whisper “I love you baba.”
I’m so glad I met her, and so grateful she is a part of my life.
Ditto my wife, of course.
The past few years have been absolutely thrilling, in some sense… and mind-numbingly boring, in others. We’ve traveled the world and been stuck in a box; we’ve celebrated in style and evacuated in fear; we’ve been showered in both kisses and in urine by our baby. Our marriage feels forged in the vortex; tempered by reality, yet somehow still absolutely unreal. I mean, how is it possible to love someone so much?
I have no idea what I did, but I nailed it.
What else?
Work is equal parts fun and difficult.
I get to work with amazing executives and investors, challenging them and myself to communicate our best when the stakes are highest.
I get to travel a lot — to familiar haunts in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as newer fertile ground in Singapore and the Middle East.
I’ve (finally) started a podcast series — the Essence of Investing — that explores the stories, strategies, wit and wisdom of investors from across Asia-Pacific and beyond.
But it is also a profoundly difficult market environment for cross-border communication right now. The triple-whammy of geopolitics, tech disruption, and allocation/budget cuts are hitting us… as well as our clients… and our clients’ clients, and so on….
Is there an end in sight? Maybe you have a crystal ball, but I don’t.
Recent years have left me suspicious of forecasts, anyway; I prefer to develop my reactive judgement, intuition, and adaptivity over forward-looking projections and plans.
So no hints here as to what comes next for me, save one:
By mid-next-year, our little family is likely to grow once again.
That prospect, along with a sense of great opportunity in the year to come (the last of my thirties!), makes my heart hum with peace, pride, and anticipation.
The only thing missing, as always, is you.
Dear reader, beloved friend: I miss you now as I have missed you for years. I savor the thought of our reunion, however and whenever that may be. Know that in the meantime I cherish your unique contribution to my life and being — the special strain of you that has bred in my bone — and know that your love is felt and cherished and reciprocated in full.
Miss you as I may, I know that beneath the superficial distance in space, we are eternally united.
Two sides of a tile. Grains in a chain. Aspects of an infinite whole.
All is one,
Jonathan
