"What difference between yes and no? What difference between success and failure? Must you value what others value? Avoid what others avoid? How ridiculous." -Tao Te Ching

Problems arise from the realm of perception—which is the need to judge, the impulse to evaluate good days and bad days or good news and bad news. But these mental evaluations don’t mean anything.

To label, judge, or evaluate is to place faith in the ego even as the ego does not know what it wants or how to get it. Sometimes you encounter a setback which turns out later to be the best thing that could ever have happened. Take another example, you might celebrate getting a job you wanted. Then, months later, it becomes a source of misery.

In truth, there is no way to know what is good or bad. There are too many variables, too many unknowns, too many factors that lie beyond the realm of perception. Most of us are lost in hopes and fears even as we are blind to how everything is. “Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self.” Tao Te Ching (13)

The master learns not to evaluate reality. She is present. He accepts everything that is happening as just something that is happening. She stops the mind from judging, complaining, or even celebrating. He says yes to life and follows the signs. What is just is. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.