Ren

Ren is yang energy gone underground, feeding everything from below while nothing shows on the surface. As an image it is the great river — the volume of water that does not stop for anyone. What it describes is change and unsettledness: a matter that will not come to rest, and will not quite be held either.

• Movement and flux: relocation, things being shifted, people coming and going. Nothing about the situation is stable.
• Confinement: the net dropping, the cell door, circumstances a person is tied inside — and the version of that which is purely internal, feeling trapped and without solid ground underfoot.
• Wit that runs slippery: quick, fluid, able to turn on the spot, but with danger inside the softness. Too much of this water and the cleverness overshoots; more again and there is no turning back from it.
• Rivers get surveyed upstream as well as down. Ren's place on the heaven plate is the current the matter is caught in and the way it is being carried; its place on the earth plate is the source it came out of and the bed it is really running over.

Ren is a poor stem for beginnings. Something being launched — a new venture, a first step, anything that has to be got moving from standing — is not what it is for. What it is genuinely good at is keeping in motion what is already in motion.

Nature

Drop the person involved somewhere new, or into a subject they have never touched, and they are working in it almost immediately — freedom is the requirement, and so is knowing there is more than one way this could go. Thoughts arrive fast and connect themselves up without being told to. A fixed frame is the one thing that is genuinely unbearable. Easy-going on the surface; the mind underneath is not easily moved.

Style

The approach is never conventional and rarely single — several lines get laid down at once, and which one is taken is decided late, from how the situation actually turns. Change is not an inconvenience here, it is the gap to move through. When things stop entirely the person involved will stir the water themselves rather than wait.

Strength

Absorbs anything quickly, and joins information, opinions and resources scattered across places nobody had connected before into a plan that did not previously exist. Roles that cross boundaries suit best — strategy, advisory work, communications. The freer the movement, the more comes out of it.

Impression

Bright, fluid, and hard to label with any one word. The range of subjects is wide, the mind is quick, and anything new gets caught without effort. Easy company on first meeting; the scale of what the person involved is actually holding only becomes visible later.

Pitfall

Too much thinking, spread too thin. When feeling swings the judgement swings with it. Boundaries do not hold, so energy leaks steadily outward — and because stopping is the thing being avoided, direction is exactly what goes missing.

Indoors, Ren is the water infrastructure of a building: the mains supply and the pipework, wells and drains, door leaves, and the bathtub, sink and water heater.

• Objects: quilts, curtains and lampshades, alcohol and drinks, firefighting equipment, rainwater and the barrels that hold it — and vehicles and transport while they are actually running.
• Buildings and places: rivers, lakes and sea, roads and the foot traffic on them, cinemas, halls, restaurants, stations, docks and airports — and prisons.
• Outdoors: rivers and watercourses, ponds and lakes, wells, roads large and small, and aquaculture and activity on the water.

The places Ren claims all have one thing in common: people and goods pass through them rather than settle in them. A station, a dock, an airport, a cinema, a restaurant — every one of them is somewhere you are on your way through.