Journal

(a friend gave me this book to read) Wu Wei is being sensitive to circumstances. "Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition."

I think all along, my parents have thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into the inner workings of my Wu Wei. Their estimation of circumstances is, well, frequently hard for other people to fathom--"How did you reach that conclusion?" (or sometimes it isn't, but it just seems like some unneccesary concern that leaves you shugging your shoulders)

Where it has become a problem is where they have tried to unduly affect my Wu! At times they've done all they could to thwart and sidetrack my responses. My intuition tells me one thing, and they're clamoring "No, no, no, listen to us!" And so I pause to listen and consider...but they're generally unable to explain the reasons for their insistance.

I've seen the reverse of this, where some insistant child cannot yet quite grasp the reasons behind some authority figure's edicts. They will swear that the adult "has no good reason for making them...." but that's not me. I'm not that child, and never was that child." If anything, I think I've really missed having someone around on the same Wu Wei wave length.

Wow, I think I may actually have made some progress gaining support from my family for my career change! Anybody would think I was having a sex change from the way they were carrying on. But I went to my father and explained to him in financial terms how it really was an investment in my future--and a better investment than say playing a shell game in the housing market the way my cousin did. She's going back to school too, hopefully.

In a strange way, I see this as an opportunity. In a way, it's a good time to change my career. I didn't really see it happening before, at least not readily. It seemed so tough to try and pull off on my own...not impossible but certainly daunting!

If I can just do this now, maybe at last I can be in a situation that really suits my temperament and ingenuity. After all, when I was a kid, I did talk him into letting me get my ears pierced eight years sooner than he suggested.