Flexibility (by Duc Luu, Sep 10, 1999.)

I happened to read a short story written by Diane Dreher in her book of "The Inner Peace"
The story described the author's own experience of raising tropical fish. It simply sent a moral story as how one should adapt the concept of being flexible and cooperative in life. Here I quote the story,
"...When I first set up my aquarium I couldn't understand why the fish were dying. The water was clean, the fish seemed healthy, and we certainly fed them enough. But since the tank was new, the water was too clean. A "seasoned" tank gradually develops enough beneficial bacteria to break down the fishes' waste products. Ours had not. Then there was the food. Without enough food, the fish will starve. But too much food falls to the bottom and pollutes the tank.
When we got the bacteria and the food figured out, our tank seemed stabilized, so we bought more fish. Wrong again. A harmonious community requires the right number and right kind of fish. The carrying capacity of any tank is one inch of fish per gallon of water: in our case eight small fish was the maximum. Exceeding that causes imbalance, pollution, and disease. Our final error was putting the wrong kind of fish together. Some fish are just not good neighbors. Our two white angel fish looked beautiful but were quite vicious, attacking and killing the peaceful guppies. We finally removed them from the tank and took them back to the pet store."
Diane's short story reflects a common sense in life: It is not that easy to keep things in balance and it requires a great deal of being flexible and cooperative of all things.

Speaking of a great deal of being cooperative, a few months ago when the NBC Dateline aired a report regarding a confrontation issue between an Indian group that tried to maintain its traditional culture by hunting whales when the season came and an animal-activist group that tried to prevent such hunting.
The issue would not be such a big deal had those who involved in hunting respect certain characteristics of being cooperative. In this case, the hunters should have validated how the cultural tradition stands in current society.
In the early day, mankinds population were not such a big threat to the whales' community. Other factors were not a significant threat to mother nature at the time so killing a few whales at the time were not such a big deal.
Emerging today's modern society where both population and man-made technologies have been increasing; so have the threats and the destruction of wild-life and natural environment. One should restrain oneself from contributing to such threats.
Burning fireworks had always been a typical tradition in Vietnamese culture when New Years come. It had always been an a-must do thing in New Year's day no matter what. However; surprisingly due to the increasing of injuries, none-safety conditions, and many other mal-practices issues that increased the concern of the government. The country's hard-liners had recently decided to ban fireworks indefintely. Banning such typical element from its own traditional culture surely disappointed all Vietnameses both inside and outside of the country. However, according to the current situation, that was just what needed be done for the country's own safety from many perspectives. People's cooperation was needed there.
Keeping and maintaining one's own traditional culture is important; but sometimes one needs to take steps to do what is needed according to the current time as well.
Last but not least, a simple task one could see from companies that engaged into ISO 9000 certification program; GTE Telops for example. Operations procedures and work instructions surely would be updated constantly. Old procedures that are no longer applicable and compatible with new products should be removed and new operations procedures should be revised and updated if the company wants to past the auditing process. Simple is that.
Things change from place after place, time after time, and generations after generations. Merging oneself in the stream of current functioning society has always been a reasonable step to fit in the society that one lives at time. Flexibility and definitely being cooperative have always been a solid foundation form of life.
Once again, bringing up this concept, one would be reminded that old styly traditions and rules that were written thousands of years ago, by no mean, are always absolutely and necessarily applicable, compatible, and adaptable to today's situation.
Morally speaking, rules and traditional culture are important to be kept and followed up, but they need to be reasonable, compatible, and applicable with one's current situation.
Being comprehensible, flexible, and last but not least, open to current situations are keys to contibute to the growth of the society. The so-called extremist conservative traditional "rule-followers" sometimes need to loosen up sometimes to make life easiers for others to fit in.

Duc Luu