ZenView
By Chris Condon
The Wood Snake’s New Skin
It is with both a sense of honor and more than a little modesty that, henceforth, I will be taking on Mary Layton’s very fine column, Zen View, beginning with this February issue of the ModestoView. In last month’s issue, Mary brought up a topic – the Chinese Zodiac’s New Year of the Wood Snake – that seems the perfect place to start this new adventure.
Truth be told, any new adventure, while often exciting, often entails some uncertainty. To some extent, this feeling is rooted in the all-too-human fear of the unknown. Who knows what’s around the corner, or approaching from behind, or just beneath the surface? Who can blame any of us for sometimes preferring the known, the secure, the predictable? The sure thing seems so… well… reassuring!
Yet time is always flowing. Things change. The world turns. This movement – the snake shedding its skin – is an inevitable part of our lives. We can move with it.
One of my favorite authors, a psychiatrist named Daniel Siegel, offers us one way of understanding the nature of such change. He describes our lives as akin to being on a boat moving down a river of time, with one bank of the river being a world of rigidity and the other bank being a world of chaos. Our job is to skillfully navigate the ship – our lives – between these two banks of the river, sometimes moving a little more towards more adaptability and sometimes moving more towards familiarity. Both are good. We need to balance and integrate both of these movements while avoiding the riverbanks’ shoals as we go.
Late in the sixth century BC, the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote that “no man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.”
So, perhaps we can all welcome this change, just as the Wood Snake may soon come to admire its lovely new skin.
Welcome to Chris Condon
Chris is a recently retired school psychologist and former middle school English teacher who enjoys writing, music, photography, and the outdoors. He has been practicing t’ai chi with the T’ai Chi Ch’uan Academy of Modesto since the early 2000s and has an ongoing mindfulness meditation practice. He loves to travel to far-off and less visited places. He lives in Modesto with his wife and their two cats.
