It’s not easy to get anything done at present. My doctor suggests I blame the treatment, not the condition itself, and not to expect the return of normal health till December. So I’ll try and tie up a loose end or two, in the meantime.
For example, I quoted a tag at the end of my last, “Practise not-doing, and everything will fall into place”, then added, “I don’t know what this means”. This is not good enough: such a claim deserves close scrutiny, and though I already wrote a post on “Not-Doing” last year, I still don’t think I’ve managed to grasp its implications. I got it from a free poetic translation of Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, by Stephen Mitchell. Here’s an excerpt from his Foreword:
People usually think of Lao-Tzu as a hermit, a dropout from society, dwelling serenely in some mountain hut, unvisited except perhaps by the occasional traveler arriving from a ’60s joke to ask, “What is the meaning of life?” But it’s clear from his teachings that he deeply cared about society, if society means the welfare of one’s fellow human beings; his book is, among other things, a treatise on the art of government, whether of a country or a child. The misperception may arise from his insistence on wei wu wei, literally “doing not-doing”, which has been seen as passivity. Nothing could be further from the truth. A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference from the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.
Nothing is done because the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed; the fuel has been completely transformed into flame. This “nothing” is, in fact, everything. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body.
. . .
Lao-Tzu’s central figure is a man or woman whose life is in perfect harmony with the way things are. This is not an idea; it is a reality; I have seen it. The Master has mastered Nature; not in the sense of conquering it, but of becoming it. In surrendering to the Tao, in giving up all concepts, judgments and desires, her mind grows naturally compassionate. She finds deep in her own experience the central truths of the art of living, which are paradoxical only on the surface: that the more truly solitary we are, the more compassionate we can be; the more we let go of what we love, the more present our love becomes; the clearer our insight into what is beyond good and evil, the more we can embody the good.
Such is the challenge. And thus, seeking further insight, I go back to Mitchell’s adventurous translation, and the even more adventurous glosses he adds in his Notes. Such as this, from Chapter 63:
The Master never reaches for the great;
thus she achieves greatness.
When she runs into a difficulty,
she stops and gives herself to it.
She doesn’t cling to her own comfort;
thus problems are no problem for her
Mitchell’s note on When she runs into a difficulty: “A difficulty is like a letter with her address on it.”
a wayfarer’s notes 