Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee is my hero. He has been since my freshman year and I read this quote: 

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. 

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” 

At that time, I had never seen footage of Bruce Lee fighting, or doing anything for that matter. Yet the idea hit me as if Bruce himself had punched it into my skull; why would the natural properties of the substance that makes up the majority of my body not provide insight into the natural properties of myself as a whole? Within a week of hearing his quote, my personal worldview had changed: spiritual meaning was no longer limited to philosophical words and explanations, but could be found literally (and I mean literally in as literal of a way possible) anything: water, animals, my friends, etc. And within a week of that first week, I was pretty sure I had a full handle on the whole spirituality thing. 

Fast forward two years and you’d find me still baffled by the insights that just a single cup of water could provide. I have learned volumes since the day I heard that quote, but all that I have learned only increases the validity of the lifestyle Bruce Lee proposed. I think I’m starting to understand why it feels so bulletproof: in life, change is not only natural, it is essential.

Water is the most adaptable substance on Earth: it can appear naturally in any one of its forms and can change between forms freely as situations allow. If water is necessary for life, then the fact that life must adapt to survive almost seems like a progression of the way water adapts to its environment (notice that water adapting to its environment changes its environment, i.e. a creek cutting a raving on a hillside). As environments change, the only life that remains does so because it was capable of adapting to and coping with those changes long enough to reproduce. But it’s not like life is actively trying to evolve, it’s just that only certain forms of it survive under the variable conditions of the universe. The water in the river isn’t actively choosing which way to cut its meanders, it is simply taking the path of least resistance. And no one ever says that a river isn’t flowing the right way, or that a waterfall has been misplaced. 

 

Unless, of course, life changes it and builds a dam. But even those last trickles of the Colorado River are cutting perfect paths in the sand, miles away from the ocean. Consciousness has allowed humans to consider all choices possible, and it seems that ability has caused us to lose sight of the natural path. Unless, in some strange way, our environmental destruction is part of our species role, some kind of global parasite perhaps. I know at least in my own life, when I look back on the various things I regret, in hindsight there is always some obvious better choice I should have made. That’s always what gets me too: how glaringly clear the right choice seems to have been. I can’t help thinking that I get tangled up and make bad decisions not because I can’t think of the right thing to do, but because so many other options present themselves alongside of it. It’s easy to lose sight with so many options, “the more we crave for convenience, the more we long to be like no one in particular.”

Bruce Lee has a lot of amazing quotes and ideas, but one of them that stands out is his philosophy on martial arts as a whole. He was a student of Weng Chung kung fu, until eventually came to decide that an individual can only physically express themselves fully when doing it in their own way. He developed his own style, which for a long time he was hesitant to name, fearing that to crystalize it would limit its potential. Eventually he did name it, calling it Jeet Kun Do, which translates to “the way of the intercepting fist.” 

This video is fantastic. I just found it thanks to google, and it really sums up this whole Bruce Lee thing better than I ever can, mostly because it’s Bruce Lee explaining it! Enjoy, and, remember to be like water!