Today is Friday. A twenty-four hour quantum of life, that consciousness apprehends in order to value, to honor and appreciate the varied relationships, the web that sustains and secures me, body/mind.

Starbucks is alive; there’s a hubbub of voices, and a ceiling speaker mounted almost directly above me transmits in crystalline timbre, the lyric of The Flame, one of the pop hits by Cheap Trick.

Certainly others begin their day here for the same reason that I do. Homo Sapiens are social by nature. That is, we’d not survive very long without the benefit of economic transactions, and so too with our inner equilibrium, – acknowledgement given and received establishes me as a part of “us”. I could hardly do without the cheerful “hello” or “good morning” from those in this space, individuals that I recognize, though I do not know many names.

These verses from the Tao Te Ching outline a strategy for occupying your locale within the epoch that you find yourself. Time to exit the American hamster-wheel, – a pursuit of fame, approval, wealth. It’s not what we thought. It is actually quite deranged.

Here’s the ancient formula:

Vs. 13

To be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.
To take the body seriously
is to admit that one can suffer.

What does that mean,
to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear?
Favor debases:
we fear to lose it,
fear to win it.
So to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.

What does that mean,
to take the body seriously
is to admit that one an suffer?
I suffer because I’m a body;
if I weren’t a body,
how could I suffer?

So people who set their bodily good
before the public good
could be trusted with the commonwealth,
and people who treated the body politic
as gently as their own body
would be worthy to govern the commonwealth.

by Lao Tsu, trans. by Ursula K. Le Guin