The Path by Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh

Author:Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

A World That Seems Natural

Let’s say you’ve had a really bad day and feel overwhelmingly stressed out. You didn’t sleep well the night before because you had two presentations to prepare for work, and your daughter reminded you at ten o’clock at night that she needed supplies for a school project the next day. You’ve had one meeting after another all day long, and now it’s three o’clock, you’ve eaten nothing but chocolate, and you have a meeting coming up that you agreed to three weeks ago when you thought you would have time for it. In fact, you had volunteered to lead the meeting. You feel irritated just thinking about one more obligation.

So what might happen next? You could rush into the meeting, harried, stressed, angry at your pressure-cooker life, and just get it over with. The others at the meeting would begin to feed off of your stress, anger, and exhaustion. Your feelings would bring out their own stress, anger, and exhaustion. You might start making recommendations, but the others would probably oppose them because of the contentious mood of the room. Minor conflicts would begin to emerge that had little to do with the content of your suggestions. The entire meeting would become an unpleasant scene of conflict, and you would leave feeling even worse than before.

We’ve all probably sat through meetings like this, where subtle undercurrents of resentment and bad feeling end up undermining things. In fact, most of us have probably had this experience in life in general. It happens when we see ourselves as separate from others and let our unhappiness seep into their experience without our even being aware of it.

The Laozi is actually quite specific about who will be most influential in any given situation: it is those who practice nonaction ( wu-wei), which in the Laozi means appearing not to move or act but, in fact, being very, very powerful. Remember the Russian generals who lured Napoleon deeper and deeper into their trap. Those who practice nonaction seem not to act. But in reality, they actually direct everything.

Here’s an alternative scenario, one more in tune with the Way. Let’s go back to the meeting you had volunteered to lead. It’s the same situation: you’ve had a hard, frenzied day, and this feels like one more obligation on top of so many others.

You rush to the door of the conference room. But this time, before you enter, you stop, breathe deeply, and calm yourself. You are stilling yourself, bringing down your stress levels, and your anger, and getting to that place where you can see everything as undifferentiated. When you still yourself, you’re getting closer to the Way.

Then, and only then, after you have gained a sense of stillness, do you walk into the room. You immediately sense the room and all the people sitting there in all of their complexity. You can intuit that there are some people who are stressed, some who are disengaged, and others who are excited to be there.

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