Learning to Walk on Slippery Earth

I came across something recently that stopped me in my tracks.

I was reading about Aztec—or more specifically, Nahua—philosophy when I encountered an idea that felt strangely familiar.

The earth is slippery.

Not metaphorically in the casual sense that life is difficult.

The Nahua philosophers described human existence as taking place on tlalticpac, this unstable, uncertain earth where it is remarkably easy for a person to lose their footing.

The philosophical problem, then, was not simply:

What is true?

It was something closer to:

How do we walk here without continually losing our balance?

That distinction fascinated me.

James Maffie, a philosopher who has written extensively on Nahua thought, describes this orientation as more “way-seeking” than “truth-seeking.” Philosophy, from this perspective, becomes less about possessing the correct intellectual explanation of reality and more about learning how to live skillfully within a reality that is constantly moving beneath us.

And as soon as I read that, I thought:

I know this place.

I have been walking on slippery earth my entire life.

A World in Motion

Another idea in the philosophy caught my attention: Teotl.

In Maffie’s interpretation of Nahua thought, Teotl is not a creator standing outside creation directing everything from somewhere else.

It is closer to reality as an ongoing process—dynamic, generative, transforming, perpetually becoming.

Reality is not fundamentally a collection of fixed things.

It is movement.

Process.

Change.

Things temporarily taking form before changing again.

That interpretation immediately reminded me of Taoism.

Not because Teotl and Tao are the same thing. They emerged from different civilizations, languages, histories, and cultural worlds, and collapsing them into one philosophy would erase precisely what makes discovering the similarity so interesting.

What struck me was the resonance.

Two civilizations separated by an ocean and enormous stretches of history both developed philosophical traditions that looked at the world and seemed to notice something similar:

Reality moves.

And perhaps wisdom has less to do with stopping that movement than learning how to participate in it.

The Tao Te Ching continually returns to water.

Water moves around obstacles.

It does not argue with the shape of the riverbed.

It yields without necessarily being weak.

It finds its path by responding to the terrain it actually encounters.

There is an intelligence in that which has always appealed to me.

I have never been particularly interested in philosophies that promise complete control over life.

Maybe that is the engineer in me.

Spend enough time around mechanical systems and eventually reality humbles you.

Pressure changes.

Components wear.

Temperatures fluctuate.

Loads shift.

Materials fatigue.

Environments introduce variables you did not account for.

And sometimes something fails in a way nobody predicted.

The fantasy of total control usually survives only until the system is actually operating.

Human beings are not terribly different.

The Ocean

Human Design uses an image I have always appreciated: life as navigating an ocean.

You cannot stop the waves.

You cannot negotiate with the current.

You cannot stand at the bow of the boat demanding that the ocean rearrange itself according to the route your mind planned yesterday.

The ocean does not care about the itinerary.

You navigate what is actually there.

Human Design, at least as I have experienced it, is not really an attempt to control that ocean.

Strategy and Inner Authority are much more interesting than that.

They are ways of navigating.

They move the emphasis away from trying to mentally calculate an entire life and toward noticing how this particular human being is designed to make their way through it.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

The mind wants a map.

Life gives us weather.

The mind wants certainty.

Life gives us conditions.

The mind wants to know where all of this is going.

The body is dealing with what is happening now.

For years I thought much of personal development was about becoming increasingly capable of controlling the variables.

Make better plans.

Develop better habits.

Improve discipline.

Eliminate weaknesses.

Optimize the system.

There is value in some of that.

But eventually optimization itself can become another form of resistance.

We start trying to engineer ourselves into people who never slip.

And slippery earth does not permit that.

Reliability Means Something Different Here

Reliability has been part of my professional world for most of my adult life.

In industry, we spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how systems fail.

We perform root cause analyses.

We study failure modes.

We monitor vibration, temperature, wear, pressure, corrosion, and other indicators.

We build preventive maintenance programs.

We ask what conditions allow a system to perform its intended function.

Somewhere along the way, I began asking the same questions about being human.

What does human reliability mean?

For me, it increasingly means something very different from becoming perfectly consistent.

The reliability of being human means operating reliably as yourself.

That doesn't mean never changing.

It doesn't mean never struggling.

It certainly doesn't mean living some magically frictionless existence where everything flows exactly as we want.

A reliable sailboat still encounters storms.

A reliable suspension system still moves.

A reliable structure experiences loads.

Reliability is not the absence of forces acting upon a system.

It is the ability of that system to meet changing conditions without losing the integrity of what it is.

That is where the slippery earth, Taoism, and Human Design begin to converge for me.

Not as identical philosophies.

As different doors into a similar question.

How do we live well inside movement?

The Nahua answer, at least through the interpretation I was reading, involved balance and rootedness. Wisdom was practical: knowing how to conduct yourself on unstable ground. Earthly existence was understood as fleeting and precarious; balance was something continually practiced rather than permanently achieved.

Taoism asks us to become sensitive to the Way rather than constantly imposing our will upon it.

Human Design asks us to experiment with our own Strategy and Authority rather than allowing the mind to decide how life should unfold.

And my own work with reliability keeps bringing me back to the behavior of systems under real conditions.

Different languages.

Different traditions.

Different histories.

But there is something in the overlap that keeps getting my attention.

Stop Trying to Stabilize the Earth

Maybe one of our strangest human habits is believing that someday we will finally get everything arranged correctly.

The career.

The relationship.

The money.

The body.

The house.

The understanding.

The spiritual practice.

The perfect morning routine.

Then, finally, the ground will stop moving.

But it never does.

You get the job and the company changes.

You understand yourself and then discover something you hadn't seen.

You find a relationship and both people continue becoming different people.

The body ages.

Plans collapse.

Something unexpected arrives.

Something expected disappears.

The earth remains slippery.

I don't find that depressing.

Increasingly, I find it relieving.

Because perhaps my job was never to stabilize the earth.

Perhaps my job is to learn how I move across it.

That is a very different project.

It replaces control with attention.

Performance with observation.

Certainty with sensitivity.

Instead of constantly asking:

How do I prevent life from disrupting me?

I become more interested in asking:

What happens in me when life moves?

Where does pressure appear?

Where does my mind rush in to manufacture certainty?

Where do I abandon what I know about myself because the terrain suddenly becomes uncomfortable?

Where do I fight the current simply because it is not carrying me where I expected to go?

Those questions feel alive to me.

The Workshop

They are also becoming the foundation of the space I am creating now.

I've been trying to understand what I want my work to become.

A website?

A collection of essays?

Videos?

A Human Design course?

Conversations?

Teaching?

Probably all of those at different times.

But underneath the formats, I am beginning to see the atmosphere more clearly.

I imagine a workshop.

Not a pristine laboratory with everything labeled and finished.

A lived-in room.

Notebooks open on the table.

Half-finished diagrams on a whiteboard.

Engineering manuals sitting next to books about Taoism, consciousness, mythology, and Human Design.

A violin resting in the corner.

Cold coffee beside some question that became more interesting than whatever I was supposed to be doing.

Things are being built there.

Other things are being taken apart.

Not necessarily because they are broken.

Sometimes you take something apart because you want to understand how it works.

That is what I want this work to feel like.

Not a self-help seminar.

Not a place where I stand at the front of the room claiming to have solved the human condition.

Not another program promising that thirty days from now you will finally become the person you were apparently failing to be before.

I'm tired of that.

I want a workbench.

A place where we can put an idea down between us and examine it.

Human Design can sit there.

Taoism can sit there.

Reliability engineering can sit there.

Teotl and the slippery earth can sit there.

Music, mythology, pressure, decision-making, consciousness, failure, uncertainty, and whatever else wanders through the door can sit there too.

We don't have to force them into agreement.

We can simply notice what they illuminate in one another.

A Chair at the Bench

Maybe that is where I am now.

For much of my life, I have been trying to understand systems.

First mechanical systems.

Then organizations.

Then safety systems.

Then human systems.

Eventually the investigation turned inward.

How does this particular human being operate?

What creates unnecessary pressure?

What happens when I make decisions from my mind?

What changes when I trust something deeper and more immediate in myself?

What does it mean to stand on my own ground when the ground itself never really stops moving?

I don't think I am looking for a final philosophy anymore.

Maybe I am becoming less interested in the final answer altogether.

I am interested in learning how to walk.

How to navigate.

How to notice.

How to remain rooted without becoming rigid.

How to participate in life without demanding that life hold still long enough for me to understand it.

Thousands of miles from ancient China, Nahua philosophers looked around their world and described a slippery earth.

Centuries later, I encountered their words through a glowing screen and recognized something.

Not proof that every tradition secretly teaches the same thing.

Something more human than that.

People separated by worlds can look deeply at existence and sometimes notice similar patterns.

Water moves.

Earth shifts.

Life changes.

Human beings lose their footing.

And still, somehow, we learn to walk.

That is the work I want to explore here.

I don't know exactly what it will become.

For once, I am becoming comfortable with that.

The workshop is open.

There are things on the bench I haven't figured out yet.

Good.

That's why I built the room.

There's a chair here if you'd like to join me.

See reference article here: https://iep.utm.edu/aztec-philosophy/