Unsui
Let’s do a thought experiment and think of ourselves as water. It shouldn’t be too hard—it’s 99% true.
As we got through life, we pour ourselves into different containers: a school, a job, a circle of friends.
The good thing about these containers is that they give us shape and hold us together by providing us with income as well as social identity. The longer we stay in these containers, the more adapted we become to them.
The downside of these containers is that we risk becoming too dependent on them to hold us and give us shape. If the containers begin to leak, crack or disappear altogether, we risk being spilt on to the ground ourselves.
Water exists in three different states: gas, liquid, and frozen. To continue our water analogy, so do we. In our gas state, we are too vague and scattered. In our frozen state, we are too dependent on the container that holds us.
We need to cultivate the ability to continually flow from one container to another as circumstances change. In stable times, we can linger in each container, and flow slowly. But in turbulent times we must be able to adapt quickly.
For the past 200 years most of us have depended on a container called the company or government job. We have distanced ourselves so much from the job of flowing and adapting that we have given it fancy names such as entrepreneurship, design, and innovation and assumed that it was something only a select few are supposed to do.
But the job is becoming obsolete. We all need to remember that innovation, entrepreneurship and design are just fancy words for learning, for evolving which what has always made us human.
And we are not talking about the traditional passive type of learning in classrooms where we expect someone to teach us. We are talking about the kind of learning we do ourselves with others by doing. We are talking about learning that is done by musicians, athletes and craftspeople.
How do we learn to do this again? By emulating musicians, film makers and organising ourselves around projects instead of jobs.
By emulating cities instead of companies and participating and collaborating in a variety of activities with those around us. Sometimes for the sake of money, sometimes for play, sometimes to learn, sometimes to meet new collaborators , sometimes for all of these.
By cultivating the spirit of UNSUI1 which literally translates as cloud and water, but also means cultivating the ability to float and flow, at once with and without form.
Unsui (雲水) is a Japanese Zen term meaning literally “cloud and water.” It originally described novice monks who wandered between monasteries seeking instruction — no fixed abode, no permanent teacher, perpetually in motion