Before the devotion, the spring dried up
A familiar Chinese expression, xiangru yimo, pictures creatures keeping one another moist with the moisture of their mouths. In ordinary use, it celebrates devotion through hardship: spouses who endure together, friends who share the last of what they have.
That meaning has lived in the language for a long time. It is moving, and not a misuse that needs to be stamped out. But return to The Great Ancestral Teacher and something has happened before the celebrated assistance begins. The spring has dried up.
The fish are stranded on land, blowing moisture toward one another and wetting each other with foam. The passage then makes a comparison often left out of the familiar expression: better to forget one another in rivers and lakes. Better, it continues, to forget both praising Yao and condemning Jie, and transform with the Way.
Put the water back into the picture, and the question changes. We still see the help. We also begin to ask why remaining alive requires quite so much effort.
Keep the affection, and keep the dry ground
Later uses of an expression can be legitimate developments. An old image may enter marriages, friendships, and kinds of care its original setting did not specify. The trouble is not the warmth of the later meaning, but allowing that warmth to conceal the original predicament.
These fish are not being affectionate underwater. They lack the environment in which they could live without continuously supporting one another from their own limited resources.
The text does not specify just two fish, tell us when the last drop runs out, or narrate their eventual deaths. Those details can heighten the pathos, but they would be additions to the image, not its reported conclusion.
What the passage does offer is a contrast between assistance under desperate conditions and conditions suited to living. We can cherish the first while still preferring the second. “Better” need not sneer at the help being given now. It can interrupt our admiration long enough to remind us that life should not always have to look like an endurance test.
The team that always gives a little more
Imagine a team that has been understaffed for months. Each new assignment requires everyone to stay a little later. When someone has trouble at home, colleagues cover the work. The messages of thanks are sincere. Together, they have survived many difficult evenings.
Yet if the underlying arrangement never changes, “We are such a close team” can become another demand. The first person to say that she cannot continue seems to betray the history they share.
Asking something beyond who is willing to give more may reveal a schedule, a staffing decision, an unclear responsibility, or work that could be stopped. That does not cancel the kindness between colleagues. It refuses to make kindness a reason for leaving the conditions unimproved.
This is a present-day extension, not a claim that rivers and lakes are ancient code for sensible staffing. It helps expose a distinction: helping people through a crisis is different from requiring them to organize their whole lives as a permanent crisis response.
Forgetting need not mean growing cold
Elsewhere in the same chapter, Confucius compares fish finding their place in water with people finding their place in the Way. With an accommodating body of water, fish have provision; with the Way, human life may settle without strained interference. Fish forget one another in rivers and lakes; people forget one another in the arts of the Way.
The wording should not be reduced to fish being manufactured by water, or to a promise that doing absolutely nothing will provide a secure livelihood. Its contrast concerns a life that has somewhere to be, rather than one that must continually be held up.
A relationship may pass through something similar. During a difficult period, two people scarcely function without one another. Later, when circumstances improve, they can spend the day on separate concerns and meet again at night. The grip loosens. That need not mean affection has diminished; perhaps each finally has ground on which to stand.
Sometimes distance really is distance. The story does not explain every change in intimacy. It simply makes another interpretation available when “We no longer need each other as urgently” begins to sound like a loss of love.
Why Yao and Jie appear
The original passage moves directly from fish to praise of a sage ruler and condemnation of a tyrant. Yao and Jie do not resemble two friends trying to keep one another alive.
The leap shows that the image reaches beyond private affection. It does not establish that relationships are irrelevant. Assistance, moral assessment, and the conditions of shared life can illuminate one another at different scales.
Forgetting both rulers and transforming with the Way also challenges our attachment to the opposed verdicts themselves. If we translate that immediately as “Stop arguing and improve the working conditions,” we have made the philosophical claim much narrower than it is.
We can retain the challenge without concluding that cruelty and good government are interchangeable. Harm may still require investigation and accountability. People who have been harmed still need assistance, whether or not we wish to become absorbed in moral classification.
Conditions and responsibility can be examined together. Asking who caused the water to disappear may be part of restoring it. A question does not become superficial merely because it includes someone's name.
There is no three-point diagnosis of hopelessness
Exhaustion can make the present arrangement look like the only possible one. But feeling that no alternative exists is not the same as having established that none does.
Long working hours may reflect a serious organizational imbalance; some tasks might also be postponed. A family exhausted by care may need outside help as well as a different division of responsibilities. Often several difficulties coexist and need to be considered separately.
We cannot turn fatigue, recurring arguments, and a lack of energy for growth into three sufficient conditions for declaring that the spring has dried up. They deserve attention. They are not a diagnostic instrument supplied by the ancient passage.
Nor should an exhausted person have to prove that every possibility has been eliminated before being permitted to rest. Rest can come first, while others help identify support. The inadequacy of the present arrangement may already be reason enough to seek assistance. We need not wait for an airtight demonstration of impossibility.
The water has to be real
The fish offer one particularly concrete reminder. A change of attitude cannot, by itself, turn dry ground into a river.
Telling a person caring alone for a sick relative to let go of attachment does not take over the night shift. Advising an overwhelmed colleague not to worry so much does not move the deadline.
Reducing mutual exhaustion often requires an actual change: another person taking a turn, time to sleep, an accessible service, permission to decide that something will not be done today. None is especially grand. Any one might help more than another tribute to resilience.
That also does not mean a caregiver must supply endlessly until every condition has improved. People have limits. Seeking a handover, shared responsibility, or a safe way to withdraw may be necessary. Caring for another person should not assume the complete consumption of the one providing care.
Forgetting in the rivers cannot excuse casually abandoning someone. Devotion in hardship cannot erase the right to stop and ask for help. Both parts of the picture need to remain visible.
A quiet relationship can be a deep one
When we tell the most affecting stories of a relationship, we often describe hospitals, lost jobs, departures, and last-minute rescues. An ordinary afternoon seems to offer less material.
Yet on that afternoon, perhaps neither person needs a life-saving answer from the other. One reads, the other goes out. Either can talk; either can be alone without first having to demonstrate continuing affection.
The absence of drama does not make the day shallow. It may contain precisely the room once so difficult to obtain: no need to confirm love through another sacrifice, no need for a crisis to bind the two people together.
Forgetting becomes a little less remote here. It need not mean deleting memories or ceasing to care. It can mean that keeping the relationship alive no longer has to be an emergency task performed every minute.
Include the spring in the picture
From learning to become genuine, through friends singing beside a body, to fish at ease in water, these essays trace a question: can life be sustained by something other than continuous tightening? This is the route proposed by this reading series, not the only meaning of the passages.
The immediate work of helping remains. Someone suffering now is still worth approaching. But while helping, we can also look toward whatever keeps depriving everyone of water.
If life can become less difficult, the closeness once created by difficulty need not make us reluctant to let the difficulty pass. The memory of keeping one another alive can stay.
The future does not have to stay on the dry ground with it.