Man, I gotta tell you about this weird journey I went on recently. Things weren’t really clicking for me for a while, you know? Just felt like I was hitting a wall everywhere. My job felt like a dead end, my side projects weren’t going anywhere, and even just getting out of bed felt like a chore. I was really just dragging my feet through life.
One evening, I was just scrolling through some old stuff online, not even looking for anything specific, when I stumbled upon this article about the I Ching. I’d heard of it before, like an old fortune-telling thing, but never really paid it any mind. For some reason, that night, it just caught my eye. It talked about hexagrams and meanings, and I just figured, “What the heck, let’s see what it’s all about.”
So, I found one of those online I Ching throwers. Just to try it out, you know? I didn’t really have a burning question, just a general feeling of being stuck. I hit the button, and lo and behold, it landed on hexagram 47. The description popped up: “Oppression,” “Exhaustion,” “Confinement.” Man, talk about hitting the nail on the head! I just stared at the screen, like, “Yep, that’s exactly how I feel.”
My Dive into Hexagram 47
That really got me thinking. It wasn’t just some random flick of a coin; it felt personal. So, I figured, if it was going to call me out like that, I might as well dig into what it really meant. I wasn’t just gonna take a one-line description. I wanted to understand it.
- First up, I hit the books. I dug out an old, dusty I Ching translation my grandpa had lying around. The language was super old-school, a bit hard to get into, but I just powered through it. I started reading about the lines, the trigrams, the whole shebang. It talked about being “hemmed in” by circumstances, feeling “distressed,” and things not going your way. It really painted a picture of someone feeling trapped, and yeah, that was me.
- Then, I went online, of course. I typed in “hexagram 47 meaning” into every search engine I could think of. I found a bunch of different interpretations, some more gentle, some pretty blunt. Some talked about suffering, others about the need for perseverance. What started to stand out was the idea that even when you’re cornered, you still have some kind of power. It’s about how you react to being cornered.
- I even tried drawing it myself. Yeah, I know, sounds a bit silly, but I felt like I needed to physically interact with it. I got a piece of paper and a pen, and I drew out the broken and solid lines, one by one. I looked at the lower trigram, Dui (the Lake, expressing joy but also a hole or marsh), and the upper trigram, Kan (Water, danger, abyss). The image of a lake on top of water, or water being contained by the earth, really started to resonate with that feeling of being stuck. Water in a dry well. That was it.
As I kept digging, I realized it wasn’t just doom and gloom. A lot of the commentaries, especially the older ones, also mentioned that this hexagram often comes up when things are really bad. But it also hints at a way out, or at least a way to endure. It tells you to be patient, to look inward, and to find strength even in restriction. It wasn’t about escaping the situation immediately, but about changing your attitude within it.
What It Told Me
After all that digging, here’s what Hexagram 47 really started screaming at me:
You’re stuck, yeah, but don’t just sit there and whine about it. It was like a firm but caring slap on the back. It didn’t sugarcoat anything. It acknowledged the crap I was going through. But then it pivoted: what are you doing with this “confinement”? Are you learning from it? Are you building your inner strength?
It really drove home the point that sometimes, when you’re completely cornered, when you’ve got no other options, that’s when you have to look inside yourself. It forced me to stop looking for external solutions for a bit and really think about what I could control: my own attitude, my own effort. It wasn’t about finding a magic door to get out; it was about making the best of the room I was in, even if it was tiny and felt suffocating.
The message was to simplify, to conserve energy, and to not let despair overwhelm me. It said, “Look, things are tough right now. You can’t force your way out. So, what can you do inside this situation to make it bearable, or even to grow from it?”
Putting It into Practice
This whole thing really shifted my perspective. Instead of beating myself up for feeling unproductive, I started small. I couldn’t just magically quit my job, but I could start tidying up my workspace, even if it was just my corner of the dining table. I couldn’t launch a massive new project, but I could spend 15 minutes a day sketching, just for myself, without any pressure for it to be “good.”
I started focusing on the basic, simple things: getting enough sleep, making sure I ate actual meals, and taking walks just to breathe. It sounds so simple, almost too simple. But in that “confined” state, these little things became huge victories. They were things I could do, and doing them made me feel less helpless.
It taught me that even in the toughest spots, there’s always something you can do, even if it’s just shoring up your own spirit. It wasn’t a quick fix, not at all, but it gave me a framework to understand what I was going through and, more importantly, a way to navigate it without completely losing my mind. It’s still a work in progress, but I feel like I’ve found a tiny bit of light in that ‘dry well,’ and that’s a lot more than I had before.
