Bruce Lee’s ‘be water’ philosophy works for Hong Kong protests – can it work for trail runners?

My life over the past 13 weeks has revolved around two axes: protests and running.

Amid covering the protests, I try to think about how I can squeeze in my run for the day, or whether I’ll have the physical and mental energy to knock out a long run in the mountains on the weekend. And when I’m on the trails, I invariably think about the protests, turning over what’s happened and where things might go next.

Hong Kong has been gripped by more than two months of protests. They began as opposition to the now shelved extradition bill, that would see fugitives deported to a host of countries, including mainland China.

One of the key philosophies of Hong Kong's protest movement has been “Be Water”. It’s a guiding principle that finds its roots in a famous line spoken by martial arts legend Bruce Lee.

“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless – like water,” Lee said while playing the character of Li Tsung, a martial-arts instructor, in the 1970s American television series Longstreet. “Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash. Be water, my friend.”

For the protesters, “Be Water” has come to mean adapting quickly to circumstances, cutting losses, being mobile and agile, and creatively coming up with different forms of public civil resistance. Taking the elemental spirit a notch further, they urge each other to be “strong like ice, flow like water, gather like dew, and disperse like fog.”