Like Water Before a Wall — The I Ching on Overcoming Obstacles
The Book's image for an obstruction is water meeting rock. It does not batter the rock; it pools, it rises, and only then flows on. Being stopped is the work of gathering weight.
When we hit an obstacle, the first instinct is to push harder — to force our way over the thing blocking the path. The I Ching counsels almost the opposite. Its image for an obstruction is water on the mountain (hexagram 39, Obstruction): a stream meeting rock. Water does not batter the rock. It pools, it rises, and only then does it flow on.
The counsel that follows is not passivity but redirection — inward. “Difficulties and obstructions throw a man back upon himself,” Wilhelm writes. “While the inferior man seeks to put the blame on other persons, bewailing his fate, the superior man seeks the error within himself, and through this introspection the external obstacle becomes for him an occasion for inner enrichment and education.” The wall, in other words, is useful. “An obstruction that lasts only for a time is useful for self-development. This is the value of adversity.”
Hexagram 29, The Abysmal, makes water the explicit teacher. “Water sets the example for the right conduct under such circumstances. It flows on and on, and merely fills up all the places through which it flows; it does not shrink from any dangerous spot… and nothing can make it lose its own essential nature. It remains true to itself under all conditions.” The mechanism is patience with integrity: “Water reaches its goal by flowing continually. It fills up every depression before it flows on.” It does not leap the low place. It completes it, then advances — and completion, not force, is what carries it forward.
This is why the Book prizes waiting. But “waiting is not mere empty hoping” (hexagram 5, Waiting); “it has the inner certainty of reaching the goal.” The pooling water is not stalled — it is gathering weight. Strength here “shows itself in uncompromising truthfulness,” the courage “to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception or illusion.”
And the release, when it comes, arrives on its own timing — like weather. Hexagram 40, Deliverance, pictures it as the breaking storm: “Just as rain relieves atmospheric tension, making all the buds burst open, so a time of deliverance from burdensome pressure has a liberating and stimulating effect on life.”
Turn inward. Fill the low places. Rise. The wall gives way to the patient.