Lao Tzu says “Heaven’s Way is like stretching a bow. The high is lowered and the low is raised.

Excess is reduced and deficiency is replenished. Heaven’s Way reduces excess and replenishes

deficiency. People’s Way is not so. They reduce the deficient and supply the excessive.”

What Lao Tzu tries to tell us is that we have to avoid excess and replenish deficiency,

in other words, we need to take care of all of our resources in an equal way. Resources doesn’t

only mean money, it can be anything which can be traded or it can be anything you use for your

daily well-being. They typically are: money, your possessions e.g. your house, your car, your brain

power, your talents, and your physical prowess. In Taoism, there is the concept of Yin and Yang,

that says that each aspect of nature is dual and we need to balance the opposites in order to live

in harmony with nature. Yin is the passive and Yang is the active principle of the duality and

this duality can be seen in all patterns of nature, such as in the annual cycle - winter

and summer, the daily cycle of night and day. Yin and Yang are complementary parts of Qi,

which is the vital force driving us. If Tao is like an ocean, connecting everything,

Qi is an energy pattern, it is the wave. When our Qi is balanced between Yin and Yang and

is flowing smoothly, this leads to a fulfilled life. The concept of balancing the complementary

parts can be applied to the subject of resource management. We have to make sure we don’t use too

much of a resource at the expense of another. For example you use your talents in your job

to excess, you get promoted and you enjoy doing overtime at work,

doing what you love. But you completely ignore your health, you don’t take your time to replenish

your physical power. In the long run, this can be very detrimental, it can even shorten your life.

If you use one resource to excess, you end up creating disharmony in the universe, your vital

force – your Qi will not be balanced and, as a consequence, you can feel tired, irritable,

stressed. You can even feel pain, actual muscle weakness. It can affect your health and you may

underperform in other areas of your life. Just like any structure or a building that

is supported by equal upright pillars, the resources you have are the pillars of your

well-being. You have to nurture and balance all of them. Managing resources in our everyday

lives – be it in what we eat, what we wear, how we live, how we work – might just be the antidote

to our stressful modern, consumption-led world as taoism embraces a more balanced approach,

that is to say having just enough to meet your needs, not your wants. This leads to living a

sustainable lifestyle that embraces the pleasures of existence rather than those of consumption and

when you focus on the pleasures of existence, you live the heaven’s way - a simple, happy life.