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You probably won't believe me, but I consider this to be one of the most difficult passages in all of Master Sun's counsel. Autumn fur, sun and moon, thunder, what in tarnation are we talking about? I won't go over all the other commentaries and such, but you might want to.
I can tell you that "autumn fur" clearly refers to rabbit fur and it's soft and light and floats on the autumn wind. And I can tell you, that you simply HAVE TO HAVE verse 15, to make the slightest sense out of verses 12 - 14. The Skillful Warrior of old won EASY VICTORIES.
It really is funny when you begin to see your own leanings and assumptions in the way you read something. Me? When I first read these verses, I thought Master Sun was being scornful of how easy it would be to lift autumn fur, and I was utterly confused by the passage.
Can you say Catholic guilt? Can you say Protestant work ethic? I was raised to believe that the difficult was the good thing, the easy the bad. Satan tempts us down the highway to high with easy joys. God offers the path to salvation with difficult burdens. Or so I thought.
We mustn't get trapped in a religious or theological discussion here. I simply have to confess that my own upbringing made this passage almost impossible to decipher. So, let me be clear, Master Sun WANTS us to find challenges no more difficult than lifting autumn fur.
As a small teaser, he wants our visual acuity to need be no greater than telling the difference between sun and moon and picking each out of the sky consistently. He wants our deafness of hearing to be no more than would prevent hearing thunder clap. Easy victories.
Don't you love talking about swords? Say yes. Here's a sword myth I bet you believe in. They're heavy. If you're not build like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you wouldn't be able to be a knight fighting with a sword. You have to have great muscles to heft a heavy, old sword. Not so!
Consider, you don't know how many warriors you're going to have to kill on any given day, right? If your sword was one ounce heavier than it needs to be, you might lose power too soon. Their real weight? Between 2 & 5 pounds, tops. I own fine swords at 1.5 pounds.
My favorite swords come in between 2 & 3 pounds, and make no mistake, they're serious, historically accurate, truly battle-ready swords that any knight or prince from days of old would have been thrilled to own. Proper swords are NOT heavy! They're quick and agile yet mighty.
One more swording point. The hefting of rabbit fur is truly instructive for swordsmanship. That's exactly what it's supposed to feel like. You're not supposed to even think about the hefting, just the usage to keep safe, yourself, while making your enemy not safe.
It's tempting to return to the easy victories the Republicans seem to avoid as if they were Satan's temptations. But we've covered that already, and we're better off going really, really small here, more than just local, personal. Imagine you know two potential voters, friends.
One of your friends is a die-hard, Bernie supporting, socialist leaning liberal. The other is a voter skeptic, with a libertarian leaning who hates Trump for all kinds of completely justifiable reasons. Remember the Stern Tapes (if not look them up)? Where should you invest time?
There can be no question, the second is more like, not equal but closer to lifting autumn fur. Invest there. Let's come closer to Master Sun's guidance. You have a Trump supporting, aging relative who may not be able to get to the polling booth. Give them a ride. Autumn fur.
I don't know about you, but the idea of easy victories is essentially 100% counter-intuitive to me. I am hard-wired to fight, fight hard, fight unceasingly until, drained and exhausted I fall down with my forehead over the finish line, having scraped through against all odds.
I have to tilt my head, squint my eyes, cup my ears and try to imagine. Easy victories? Yes, Master Sun says, I know, it sounds too good to be true, but not so. Proper swords are not heavy, proper victories are not difficult. Easy victories. Yes my son. Easy Victories.
You might have noticed, I try to not reach too far forward in our readings, at least not too often, but we'll soon enough be learning about water, and how it flows downhill ever so easily. That's what easy victories look like, and it leads the way to real strategy.
No matter how blue your local district may be, there is an easily flowing stream of water - read that easy action - that flows right through it. If you learn how to lift the autumn fur of that path of action, you'll turn your district from blue to red. Hard to believe, I know.
In verses 13 & 14 we'll learn more about those strategies, and then we'll conclude this small section with the fact of it all in verse 15. I have to brag. Discovering that these 4 verses are a clump was a pretty big deal for me. But, you know, I'm a proud Sun Tzu nerd. Go figure.
To return to previous sections in our #WarForAmerica2020 and #SunTzuForMAGA series, don't forget to head over to @WarForAmerica21.
72 verses completed, 350 to go. And also, be sure to purchase John Minford's translation, here:
amazon.com/Art-War-Pengui…
72 verses completed, 350 to go. And also, be sure to purchase John Minford's translation, here:
amazon.com/Art-War-Pengui…
