What to Do When Facing Difficulties? The Wisdom of the Ancient Chinese Using the *Jian* (Gradual Progress) Hexagram Thinking to Find Earphones

In the Northern Song Dynasty, there was a scholar named Zhang Nanxuan. One day, he rummaged through his entire study but couldn’t find his usual jade hairpin, pacing around in a fluster. His friend Zhu Xi passed by and said with a smile, “Don’t worry. Let’s sort this out using the method from the *Zhouyi* (Book of Changes) — it’s better than rummaging blindly.” Don’t think this was just ancient people killing time with trivialities; there’s a fundamental logic for dealing with difficulties hidden here: don’t panic first, set the direction first.

A while ago, a friend of mine lost his earphones. In his anxiety, he turned his house upside down, even opening the fridge three times to check. I advised him to sit down first and organize his thoughts using the ancient method of casting a hexagram. He tossed coins and got the *Jian* (Gradual Progress) hexagram (Wind over Mountain), with the second and sixth lines moving, transforming into the *Jing* (The Well) hexagram (Water over Wind). Many people panic as soon as they see “the use phase overcomes the body phase,” thinking the item is lost for good. But in fact, this is a test of how to improve your judgment: don’t fixate on a single conclusion of good or bad fortune. You have to break the hexagram down into four steps — “body, use, mutual, and transformed” — peeling it layer by layer like an onion.

First, look at the original hexagram *Jian*. The *Xugua Zhuan* (Sequence of Hexagrams) says, “Jian means gradual progress,” meaning things have to be done slowly, not accomplished all at once. Earphones don’t have feet, so they definitely didn’t vanish into thin air. Most likely, they’re blocked by something. The more frantically you rummage through boxes and cabinets, the easier it is to overlook what’s right in front of you. This is just like the difficult problems we usually face: trying to solve everything in one go right off the bat often leads you down the wrong path.

Next, look at the moving lines. The second line moving corresponds to low places, and the sixth line moving corresponds to high places — hey, that’s interesting. It means the item isn’t at “the regular height you’d assume.” It’s either fallen into knee-high spots like sofa cracks or under the bed, or it’s in blind spots like the pocket of a coat on a hanger, or between books on the upper shelf. You see, the hexagram doesn’t give you the answer directly; it draws a range for you, helping you narrow down “searching the whole world” to “searching two height ranges.” Isn’t that much less effort?

The mutual hexagram is *Weiji* (Before Completion, Fire over Water), which means there will definitely be twists and turns along the way. For example, you might be interrupted by a phone message while searching, or find an old photo album halfway through and sit there looking at photos for half an hour. Don’t scold yourself for having a short attention span — these are the “distractions” mentioned in the hexagram. Just be mentally prepared in advance, and pull your focus back when you encounter them. The transformed hexagram is *Jing* (The Well). What is a well? It’s a fixed, immovable place. This means the earphones never left the house at all; they’re right in the room you usually stay in. If you initially suspected you lost them on the subway or in a café, this immediately eliminates most of the wrong options.

Later, following this line of thinking, my friend started searching from the desk in the southeast direction. He first rummaged through the low drawers, then looked up at the top shelf, and finally felt them in the pocket of a hanging windbreaker — he’d stuffed them in casually when he got off work the day before and forgotten all about it. Would you say the hexagram came true? It’s better to say that this way of thinking — “first define the scope, then divide into layers, eliminate distractions, and advance step by step” — worked.

Many people ask what to do when facing choices. In fact, the wisdom of the ancients never throws a standard answer at you; it teaches you how to break a tangled mess of things down into several steps. Just like finding earphones: you first have to judge whether they’re in the house or not, then lock in the direction, then divide into height levels, and finally check slowly. Finding things is this way, and so are working on projects, choosing directions, and making decisions — isn’t every one of them the same principle? The four characters of the *Jian* hexagram, “xun xu jian jin” (gradual progress), boil down to this: don’t panic, take it step by step, and the answer will always emerge slowly.