My Tao - Missing the Obvious

One of my wife's knitting machines stopped working the other day. There was a bang and a puff of smoke, and that was it. After some research, she found out that it must have been a capacitor that blew up, so she ordered online spare components and a soldering iron. Once her parcel arrived, we went ahead with the repair. We opened the machine. I plugged in the soldering iron. I was just about to start. Then, my wife asked rhetorically if we shouldn't start by simply replacing the fuse. I put down the soldering iron, replaced the fuse, and turned the machine on. Sure enough, it worked like a charm!

The obvious first step was right there in front of me, yet I completely missed it. All the talk of replacing capacitors had made me so set on the idea of doing some soldering that it completely escaped me that the problem might not be the capacitors.

Had this been the only case of its sort, it wouldn't deserve any mention. However, this type of situations come about way more often than I like. Completely obvious facts go unnoticed and ignored. Why does it take me so long to realize the obvious?

Our south facing balcony has a shady corner. For years, I figured it nothing more than a quaint architectural feature. I used it as a shed for pots and gardening tools. Meanwhile I struggled with plants getting burned in the intense summer sun. Why did it take me so long to realize that most plants don't like intense sun? That's what the shady area was for. Delicate flowers thrive in there.

My list of missteps of this kind is very long, and I'm sure others can relate to this as well. In fact, most people still don't realize that real money is gold and silver, not fiat issued by central bankers. Most people still think that politicians hold answers to problems in society while it's increasingly obvious that they are the source of most problems. Most people think that problems must be solved by others, and that a majority needs to be in place for action to make any sense. Yet, here I am, three years on after having terminated my bank accounts and registered business activities. Acting solely through proxies when doing business I'm much better off than I ever was.

The key to success, I'm sure, lies in mindfulness. We have to accept that solutions, even the glaringly obvious ones, come to us sometimes slowly and sometimes as epiphanies. Either way, we must set off time to relax and meditate. We must absorb the evidence in front of us and fully integrate it into our psyche. When flowers express stress. Internalize it and process it. Then, the solution comes to mind on its own.

We must let our minds wander into areas unexplored. We must study to learn, rather than to parrot. We mustn't accept anything for truth before we know it to be so. On the micro-level, this means that we mustn't simply assume that capacitors must be replaced when there's a problem with a knitting machine. On the macro-level, we must realize that liberty is personal and always within grasp. If politicians can live prosperous lives by meddling in other people's affairs, why shouldn't we live equally prosperously by keeping our labor and wealth out of their reach? If we work mainly to pay taxes, as I did for many years, why work? We're not slaves.

A shady corner of our balcony