ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Godai (Japanese philosophy)

Okay, so imagine you are building a sandcastle and you have five different buckets, each with different colored sand: red, yellow, blue, green, and black. These buckets are called godai in Japanese philosophy.

Now, these colors represent different elements of life that are important to understand:

- Red sand represents fire, which is all about energy and passion.
- Yellow sand represents the earth, which is all about stability and grounding.
- Blue sand represents water, which is all about adaptability and change.
- Green sand represents wood, which is all about growth and development.
- Black sand represents metal, which is all about strength and resilience.

Together, these five elements make up everything in the world, including us humans. By understanding these elements, we can find balance and harmony in our lives.

So, just like your sandcastle needs all five colored sand buckets to be complete, we need to recognize and cultivate all five elements within ourselves to be happy and healthy. For example, we need to have passion for our hobbies and goals (fire), but we also need to have stability in our relationships and homes (earth). We need to be adaptable to change (water), but also constantly growing and learning (wood), and we need to be strong and resilient (metal) in times of challenge.

See, isn't that easy to understand? Godai is just a way of thinking about how different parts of our lives and personalities work together to form who we are.