The Tao Te Ching is a manual for being yourself. A manual for living in the world without losing touch with what matters most: your own self, who senses, feels, thinks, imagines, reasons, judges, and decides. The subtle something that is there when you’re truly present, but whose absence renders everything subjectively meaningless.
I said it was a manual, but it is very unlike other manuals. Lao Tzu constructed the Tao Te Ching as a series of short, terse, and often opaque chapters that force you to think deeply. He says simplistic things right beside subtle things, to show you these two things aren’t that dissimilar after all. He describes the ways of a wise sage, and contrasts it with all the ways to live unwisely.
One of more prominent themes of the book, and a necessity on the road to wisdom, is the cultivation of unforced restraint.
While other teachings speak the language of right and wrong, good and evil, heaven and hell, today we are speaking the language of enough and too much.
And, what is too much? The point at which you lose yourself. Avoiding this error is the subject of our talk today.
It is not about the process
When you are in control of yourself, aware of what you are doing, for whom, and why, you know when to stop: the sufficient quantity, quality, scope, and character of the end result, whatever form it takes, is kept in view until it is reached.
In every moment, however, there is a tug of war taking place: the zoomed out maturity of perspective on the one side and the up-close pull of mindless activity on the other.
Every action offers you the opportunity to lose yourself in its performance. The opportunity to take your mind off the results and to become utterly absorbed in the action itself.
Normally, when you hear people talk about ignoring results for the sake of enjoying the process, this is presented as desirable, therapeutic, and wise.
Not so fast.
Doing things correctly means producing correct results. Losing yourself in a positive way only means finding the appropriate level of difficulty that allows you to become absorbed in the execution, rather than bored (too easy) or self conscious (too difficult).
The quality of what you produce is always paramount. How could it be otherwise?
Losing yourself, in a positive way, really means forgetting about what you’re receiving as compensation, and thinking only of the quality and quantity of effort that you are giving. It means thinking only of the needs of whatever or whoever is demanding your attention.
When you behave this way, results are never secondary: your process conforms willingly and even gleefully to what is required in order to produce the necessary results.
Finally, inputs and outputs are inseparable from one another. Nothing happens by simply brooding over your desire for results, your impatience for them, your dissatisfaction with what you have, what you’re doing, or who you are now. Outputs only follow from inputs: competent people simply keep themselves occupied with supplying the necessary inputs, and monitoring the outputs as a form of quality control. This is the extent to which “favoring the process over results” has meaning.
Chapter 9 of the Tao Te Ching communicates all of this with the highest degree of economy:
Better to stop short than fill to the brim.
Oversharpen the blade and the edge will soon blunt.
Amass a store of gold and jade and no one can protect it.
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will soon follow.
Retire when the work is done.
This is the way of heaven.
Four examples of excess, each subtler than the next. Each line a lesson in itself. It concludes with a simple injunction: stop when it is time to stop, and your life will reflect the highest virtue.
How do you know when to stop?
Here is what I am trying to understand: why do we keep going when we ought to stop? What puts us beyond the reach of the intervening hand called “enough?”
Is it pride? Is it tunnel vision? Is it immaturity? Is it impulsivity? Is it unconsciously projecting the past, or the “subconscious” onto the present reality? Is it an existential void that makes people seek wholeness in mere activity and possessions?
The cause of excess may be any of these at different times and for different people. If you want to be healthy and normal, your focus is on applying solutions, not contemplating the source of the problem. Lao Tzu explains the problem with the first four lines, and provides the solution in the last two: retire when the work is done. This is the way of heaven.
The first step in regulating yourself is to become transactional.
Bring your attention to the fact that what you’re doing is work. A task. And, because the completion of the task requires your presence every bit as much as it requires the resources you use, it follows that you too are a resource: whatever you do, everything you touch, is a project into which you are investing yourself.
To see yourself as a resource is to become conscious of expenditure. Would you keep handing money to the clerk after you’d already paid the full price? I hope not. A resource is finite, and is expended in exchange for something specific. Something that affords an advantage to the person making the expense.
To go too far is to be inattentive to the nature of the transaction at hand. As I said above, the reasons for inattention are legion. Ultimately, it is both impossible and unnecessary to know exactly why the approach is wrong, the attention is wrong, the results are wrong.
At least, for the person trying to make improvements, this knowledge is not a prerequisite for the work to begin. Rather, the nature of the illness becomes clear as one advances on the road to health. The more you come to value yourself, to see your time and energy as the valuable thing being spent, the less you will blindly run after things, because you will see it as blindly buying things.
Once you begin to draw boundaries around your resources, you will gradually go from a sieve to a reservoir. You will become (and come to see yourself as) whole.
So, and this is the important part, what happens when you operate from a place of wholeness?
You are driven by interests, and the healthy signals of your needs and instincts. Not by a misplaced desire to complete yourself. A complete person is available and responsive from moment to moment, because his or her basic existential security is intact. Such a person can operate creatively, collaboratively, helpfully, and patiently.
The Law of Diminishing Returns
All activity has three phases: the productive phase, where every unit of input reliably produces the desired outputs; the phase of diminishing returns, where the outputs decrease in quantity and/or quality; and the phase of negative returns, where more inputs actually cause a depletion of outputs.
When you are caught up in an activity, possessed by it, and thereby blinded to its results, you misinterpret the signs as you move through these three stages. Thinking that more is always the answer, you will inevitably progress into the phase of diminishing returns and mistakenly respond with a redoubling of your efforts, which only pushes you toward the phase of negative returns.
This is where burnout happens.
This is where people quit, never to return.
This is where life stops making sense.
You throw the ball and it flies in the opposite direction.
You hit the nail with the hammer and it comes back out.
You run faster and the finish line only moves farther away, until it disappears.
This is what activity in the phase of negative returns feels like.
How do you stay in the phase of productive returns?
Lao Tzu, as usual, starts with an obvious example: filling a cup with liquid. If you keep pouring liquid into the cup, pretty soon it will overflow: pouring in has now become pouring out, even though the mechanics of the activity have remained constant.
Pouring water into a cup is an easy example, precisely because nobody pours for the sake of pouring. When you pour, you watch the cup, which is to say, you are only looking at the effects (the height of the liquid) as the means by which you moderate the cause (the mechanics of pouring).
Understanding the result you are looking for, the reason you are doing the activity, is the way you focus appropriately. It tells you how, how much, in what way, for how long, and when and how to stop.
I’m writing this article right now – I have clear criteria for completion. My goal is to wake you up to the urgently important nature of everything you are so sure you already understand. To bring your attention to what is foundational and unremarkable, and activate a sense of discovery and adventure – that is my work. I have no knowledge and no presumptions about what you might like to build on your own foundation, but I do presume that your foundation could be stronger.
What limited me was precisely this: a weak and incomplete foundation. I had to learn how to stop, how to move on from something once it had served its purpose. I had to learn how to live purposefully, and to reject temptations and invitations to activities that had no clear or beneficial purpose.
I had to learn how to work, and to retire upon completion of the work. I discovered that retirement, the conscious act of finishing something and putting it aside, is both edifying and reifying.
What do I mean by that?
Edifying because I separate myself from the task by pronouncing it complete. Not perfect, but sufficient, and concluded. I regain the part of myself that was tied up in the work, and it returns to me accomplished, efficacious, dignified.
Reifying because my work now has a beginning and an end. Whatever I have done, it now lives as a discreet fact of existence, real, concrete, specific, and eternal. It is eternal because is is now part of the unalterable record of the past.
By saying, “I have now completed this,” both my person and my deeds have acquired more reality and more solidity in the world. One accomplishment at a time, I become more accomplished. If the deeds were worth doing, then the world, too, has become a better place by the same increment.
Every time I do this, I become more conscious of limits. I can see the lip of the cup in all things, because I know what activity, completion, and cessation feel like when done correctly.
Better to stop short than fill to the brim.
Oversharpen the blade and the edge will soon blunt.
Amass a store of gold and jade and no one can defend it.
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will soon follow.
Retire when the work is done.
This is the way of heaven.
Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.
-Jas
Make Beautiful Choices 