self confidence – Make Beautiful Choices

Make It Look Easy: how to become like water

I want to tell you about something strange that happened to me.

A few birthdays ago, I noticed a switch had flipped in my head. Not on the very day, but the morning after. It hasn’t switched back.

All of a sudden, everything in me said, “it’s time.”

I went from wanting to want the right things to wanting them. I stopped hesitating, and locked in on my life the way a tiger locks in on and advances toward some unsuspecting animal in a jungle.

Things changed quickly. Some very serious problems went away, never to return. I began to clean up, beautify, and expand my life, one day at a time. I got organized, made a plan, and, wonder of wonders, stuck to the plan.

What fueled me? Well, today I am fueled mostly by positive feelings of desire: I wish to see things come to fruition. I like hitting “publish,” “post,” “send,” and sometimes even “dial.”

I like the sound of my amplifier switching on, I like the monotony of weightlifting and cardio and roasting in a sauna, the monotony of maintaining my technique with the aid of an unrelenting and obnoxious metronome.

I like working on new music, preparing for a performance, bringing the gear back to the rehearsal space after it’s done, letting the sense of accomplishment digest.

I like noticing that I’m behind and knowing how to catch up, and then actually catching up and getting to spend at least a few hours in a state of “caught up.”

I like that my biggest problem is that I have to find a way to make more time for client outreach.

My friends, it was only a few years ago that my biggest problem was that I was habitually abusing drugs and alcohol, and hanging by a thread in every area of life.

I am modestly successful in an absolute sense, but relative to my own past, I really do feel like I’ve conquered the world. I crawled out of a hell of my own making, and I get to live the rest of my life as a free man upon whom such freedoms shall not be wasted.

But what fueled me?

You may have noticed I dodged the question earlier, speaking somewhat dotingly about my life now, and my cherubic inclinations to beatific edification.

But how did I get to the point of living a life that inspires a twofold approach of unrelenting ambition and delicate creativity?

Now is your chance to understand what my mother understandably misunderstands: I was fueled by an unimaginable intolerance.

Intolerance of problems. Intolerance of indolence, selfishness, wastefulness, immaturity, and everything casual.

I looked around at this gutted piñata of nothing that has accumulated around me, a suitcase full of IOUs called excuses, and I became, in a way I can only express in this way, consumed with a profoundly loving hatred.

A hatred of mediocrity. A hatred, if you can understand this, of cynicism. A hatred of all the ways I had failed to meet the world with love and commitment. My life did not look like the life of someone who loves life, but rather of someone who hates himself.

That became the object of my hatred: that I had somehow failed to exist in a state of self advocacy.

Something I told you about in another article: one of the plans I made and stuck to was the plan of memorizing the Tao Te Ching. This served me in many ways. Discipline is redemptive no matter who you are or what you need redemption from, but the Tao Te Ching was a supremely worthy object of my discipline.

Repeating and reflecting upon the words day in and day out, I truly saw the error of my ways. I saw them in every point of contrast between the perspective of a sage, which is conveyed in every line of the text, and the facts of my own life. Not just the facts of my deeds, but of my thoughts, attitudes, and emotions.

The Book Of The Way was like a filing cabinet that allowed me to finally organize my life and make it livable, even lovable.

I say all this to tie off the loose thread of my immense intolerance and hatred I spoke of before. The clear wisdom of Lao Tzu became the sword in my hand as I militated against my own selfish immaturity. It became the standard to uphold, the corrective mechanism that would kick in to stop me from doing or saying something destructive.

Little by little, the problems disappeared. I stopped creating, prolonging, and worsening them. They lost momentum and ground to a halt. Now they are strewn across some deserted wasteland like the ruins of some decadent civilization: poetic and beautiful only because they are in fact ruins.

With this in mind, let’s walk together through the garden of wisdom that is chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching. Simple, subtle, nuanced and adaptable. Simple on the surface, incomprehensibly rich upon investigation. Not the stuff of dogma, but of depth. Let us be joined in the hope that some wickedness in you might come to an end in contemplating these ideas.

Let’s begin.

EIGHT

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.

No fight: No blame.

Let’s summarize what we are looking at.

A broad statement about the nature of nature, a series of injunctions that appear to follow therefrom, and a closing “punchline” that doesn’t quite make sense in relation to the rest, at least not right away.

I intend to give a satisfactory exposition of all 3 sections, which means I am obligated to explain why one should see value in kindness, justice, and truthfulness.

This is at once preposterous and gauche in its ambition. I am no Plato, no Nietzsche, not even a garden variety PhD.

What I am is someone who understands what happens when you ignore the value of these humble virtues, and has struggled mightily to reclaim them. They mean something to me, and this is the meaning I am entitled to articulate and impart.

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

The language of the Tao Te Ching is deceptively simple. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the whole “be like water” thing so many times, in so many patronizing feel good movies, that it’s become meaningless by now.

It’s not meaningless, but simply easy to say. It’s so easy to say that it’s even easier to say unthinkingly.

When people say it’s about the process, life is a journey, or, everything in moderation, it’s about balance, and so on, these are examples of people speaking without thinking: saying meaningful things in ways that render them meaningless.

So, why don’t we attack this claim that the highest good is like water, and truly come to understand it?

If you want to understand water, listen to Mozart’s piano sonatas.

Ceaseless, effortless continuity.
Continuously inventive, always varying itself yet always consistently itself.
Always perfect – so perfect that it seems light, delicate, and inconsequential.

It flows on, unceasingly, with enough repetition that it has coherence, and enough surprises and flourishes that it dazzles.

The flow of water is just like this. Go look at a river, a brook, a lake, the waves of the ocean meeting the shore or reflecting light from the sky. Routine, predictable, even logical in the broadest sense, but bafflingly complex when viewed more closely.

There is so much going on, and yet its movements are reducible to simple descriptions.

What causes this perfect expression of both simplicity and complexity? Water’s total embrace of its environment. As it flows on, over new surfaces and under continuously changing weather conditions, these changes are like new information for the water to adapt to. Except the changes happen instantly, so much so that even the word “adapt” seems misplaced (it is).

How can we be like this?

Well, we are told that water works miracles (giving life to the ten thousand things), but does not strive.

Will we, you and I, become miraculously perfect if we simply get out of our own way and just be? If we stop trying and just let it happen through us?

Absolutely not.

If Lao Tzu really meant this, if this were true, the world would indeed be run by innocent children. It isn’t.

You arrive at a state of unforced flow by striving until striving is no longer necessary or helpful. It is the fruit of both rigorous and vigorous effort, and not a way to bypass it.

Let me say a few things about effort. Only the people who never look for shortcuts actually find them. They find them over time as their skills develop and they can see more connections between things. They become remarkably efficient in this way.

If you are looking for a way out of putting in the work, you are a child who never grew up. I mean that straightforwardly: you still see playtime as the default state of existence, and moments of exertion as unwelcomed interruptions. You feel constantly put upon, and reluctantly, half heartedly comply.

Should you go all in on effort then, hoping to work your way to mastery?

Yes and no.

You’ll have to go through an unimaginable amount of trial and error.

You’ll think you’ve got it right, and maybe it’s right for a time, but eventually it stops working.

You won’t want to admit that it no longer works, because that means admitting it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

You won’t want to admit it because you’re under the illusion that a fresh start is a negation of what came before, which it isn’t.

The truth is that it takes a lot of repetition to get good at anything. It takes long stretches of focusing on something that isn’t quite coming together in the hopes that it will, only to see nothing happen and move on, in what feels like defeat, only to find the obstacle one day vanished, days, weeks, or even decades later.

Let me tell you a secret: you have to enjoy it enough to keep going when you can’t do it well yet, but you also have to be sufficiently dissatisfied with how badly you’re doing it now to actually push hard enough to get better.

When you do something because you like doing it, you always find ways to get better at doing it. You make sure you do it often. You focus on the activity, not on how doing the activity makes you look, and this is how you can endure the awkwardness of always being a beginner at some new aspect of the activity.

You keep this up long enough, routinely maintaining your facility at something while routinely adding to your skills, and one day you arrive at fluency. The water-like ability to flow in the expression of your craft. This is giving life without striving.

In dwelling, be close to the land.

We are told, over and over again, to choose reality over fantasy.

“The land” is another word for what is real, what is rooted and grounded in sober observation and contemplation. Rooted in the physical: the body and its environment.

To quote the poet Wallace Stevens, “the Earth is a stone. It is not ‘like a stone.’” He means the physical thing is the real thing, and the image of a thing you hold in your mind, that is not physically before your physical eyes, is not a thing at all. The giant rock of the Earth is a physical stone, not merely similar to the memory of a stone that something else reminds you of (“like a stone”).

When I talk about the difference between hard substance and abstract reference, it might feel boringly obvious to you. On the other hand, if you have witnessed, in shock, the way your mind and the minds of others have completely mistaken imagination for substance, you should find this interesting.

Conduct an experiment sometime, and treat the world and everything in it as though it were utterly devoid of deeper meaning. That glance meant nothing, that tone of voice meant nothing, that lack of a response meant nothing.

Now, let me clarify that they all do mean something, but their true meaning is vastly less than the make-believe meanings you have saddled them with.

If you gradually discipline yourself to see objects and events as meaningless, trivial, and almost lifeless facts of nature, like rocks and clouds, your fantasies will die off from being starved of oxygen, so to speak. In this vacuum of invented, self-serving meaning, you can now investigate your life, the motives and behaviors of others, and the time delay between your actions and their results, in a more soberly analytical light.

There is much to be learned about the world, but you have to “dwell close to the land” to see it. You have to handle the stones yourself, rather than the toy marbles of your whimsy that are “like stones.”

In meditation, go deep in the heart.

The loneliest thing is to be physically close to another person and yet barely know them – to be lonely in their company. Therefore, when you have time to yourself, open up deeply.

Take an interest in yourself. Not as in self importance, but have some curiosity and a desire to know what is beneath the surface. Don’t assume you can see and hear and know it all from where you sit and observe now. Rather, assume there is more.

Let me now open a new path of thought. How do you get someone else to talk more? By saying something interesting, and then adopting a posture of interested receptivity toward your counterpart. Not merely hearing, but listening. Perhaps the text will occasion a more protracted discussion on listening later on, but, right now, think of meditation as listening to yourself.

The posture of meditation, the initial dimming of the lights and sitting down in such a deliberate and embarrassingly pretentious way, this is the interesting comment that gets the other going. The sustaining of the position, despite every urge to change or vary it, is the way you indicate to your self that yes, you are still listening. Still here. Still openly awaiting whatever more there is to be said.

This is the pinnacle of decency: inviting someone to say whatever it is they need to say. A self respecting person can offer this invitation to him or herself, and does so with regularity.

Imagine you have a perfect marriage. You notice some small change in your husband or wife’s demeanor, their tone of voice, the pause between the end of your statement and the beginning of theirs, a loss of appetite, anything, and you would adjust instantly. You would gently demonstrate in a way that made sense to both of you that you recognized the signs, and you’re now inviting the other to share what’s really going on.

Meditation is doing this for yourself. The routine of checking in. Maybe it’s difficult, maybe it’s easy, maybe it’s deep, maybe it’s lighthearted – but it’s real, genuine, seriously interested, and not a sham: when it’s time to get serious, you stay the course and don’t disappear.

You learn to do this, and your emotions and intuition will communicate forthrightly with your conscious mind. Over time, you will become attentive, insightful, and whole: your life will make sense. You will make sense to yourself.

This is what going deep in the heart means, and this is why you do it: so that you can legitimately say you are your own best friend, your own closest companion, your own most attentive and appreciative listener.

When you get this right with yourself, you get things wrong with other people so much less often and so much less seriously. It matters a great deal.

In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.

People often have difficulty seeing their own defensiveness, and antisocial behavior in general.

For one reason or another, it always feels perfectly rational and justified. But gentleness and kindness represents, in many ways, the opposite of a rational response: pretending like threats aren’t there. Lowering your defenses.

Yes, you’ve got it right: this isn’t exactly natural in all situations. What’s normal is to have your own survival in mind. To keep others, with their own self interested agendas, at an arm’s length.

What is implied, then, by being gentle and kind with others? That you do not fear them. However they present themselves, interact, and communicate, you are not creating impediments to a potentially flowing exchange.

I didn’t use the word “flowing” unintentionally. In many ways, we are still elaborating on what it means to be like water, what it means to say that the highest good is like water.

Close to the land: conforming to the shape of its environment or vessel.

Deep in the heart: water will flow into all openings no matter how small or remote.

Gentle and kind: “flowing” is also equivalent to “unforced.” We almost never think of water as tense, rigid, unyielding, or harsh.

A sage, the person we all wish to become, never resists, only responds. By being open with others, a sage invites them to offer their best presentation of themselves – rather than merely obliging them to manage his or her own resistance.

Give people a wide opening, a generous reception, and you’ll often see something similar in return. It diffuses tension. It lowers defenses. It promotes feelings of goodwill and magnanimity. It gives them the chance to flow freely.

And, I think this is sufficient. Being gentle and kind does not mean you infantilize people, treating them as though they were fragile simpletons. It also does not mean you do the work for them, or ignore their bad behavior. Gentleness and kindness cannot be offered by a pushover, someone who manipulates others by feigning defenselessness.

No.

Think of these as royal virtues befitting a king or queen: wherever we meet, even if it be in your own home, I treat you as an honored guest in my presence. I receive you graciously, I anticipate your needs, I give you space to think, to choose your words, and even retract them.

I invite you to share what’s on your mind, to present yourself in whatever way you feel the moment demands, and I respond with unflinching understanding and acceptance.

My complete acceptance of my own humanity is the basis for my unrehearsed and unmotivated acceptance of yours – I get to be me, you get to be you. I rather enjoy being me, truth be told, and the least I can do is make it easy for you to be yourself when you’re around me. And, lastly, if you don’t know how to do that, at least you have me as an example.

This is what being gentle and kind really means.

In speech, be true.

Hell is a real place, and you get there by lying and by doing things that self preservation requires you to lie about. I don’t mean you go there after you die. I mean you are there right now if you are a liar. I mean you wish you were dead when your life becomes an edifice of lies.

When you tell the truth, you have your innocence: something invisible to most until later in life.

When you tell the truth, your friendships are also true friendships.

When you tell the truth, you become a master of language: you understand the difference between tact and deceit, subtlety and euphemism. And, you understand this because you will find yourself in a world where people both expect you to tell the truth and are not always happy to hear it.

When you tell the truth, you will eventually end up telling truths about what you want, how you feel, and what you believe that lead you into unknown territory. Something in the familiar, the immediate, and the provincially self satisfied will simply no longer cut it for you. The call to adventure, as old as Abraham, and older, will animate your life if you simply refuse to lie about or deny it.

When you tell the truth, you know yourself. You trust yourself. You provide yourself and others with undeniable proof of your courage and character.

Why is the truth so important? Why is lying so destructive?

Because words are how we make sense of the world. The space in which we live out our lives can only be understood with words, or with thoughts that are not meaningfully distinct from words.

Even the most rigorous and well-intentioned efforts to understand the world, our selves, and how to best conduct our lives, are incomplete in serious ways. In the text we are discussing here, the Tao Te Ching, we are warned about this from the beginning:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

Our very best is incomplete, because truths that hold up on paper still have to be applied by real people, in real situations, in real time. They must be translated into action successfully, and the buck stops here, with you and me, because we are those translators.

Wherever you seek useful, truthful knowledge, you are the limiting factor in whether or not the information serves you.

In other words, the truth and hard won knowledge does not by itself make the world a better place: it is exactly half of the process.

And this is why lies are some of the worst things in the world: if our best attempts at truthfulness are still faulty, how much worse is it to give people information you know to be incorrect or deceptively incomplete?

If truthful speech is the earnest attempt to represent the objective world, lies are the opposite: the construction of an alternate, private, subjective reality, and passing it off as the real thing. A bad map.

In ruling, be just.

We always speak of truth and justice together, because they are extensions of one another: to be just is to strive for objectivity. To let states of affairs speak for themselves, and to unflinchingly follow the rules regardless of who they favor – this is justice.

But to be a just ruler means something more than “fair minded.” A just ruler settles conflicts between disagreeing or otherwise opposed parties. And, in so doing, he or she must weigh the first, second, and third order consequences of the various forms of resolution available under the circumstances.

Such considerations can seem dizzying in their complexity and their gravity. You try thinking through all the possibilities, all the different sequences of events you could set in motion were you to be given sufficient authority, and soon you are sick to your stomach with worry. Soon, the idea of playing god looks more like a one ticket to a personal hell of anxiety.

And, rightly so.

Just about all of us should sit and contemplate the sheer weight of the mantle of justice, the weight of the sword of Damocles, until we turn back in sheepish embarrassment. Until we are nauseated by the thought of bearing any responsibility for the world. The odds that you, dear reader, are utterly unfit for such a burden is something close to 100%.

Why issue the churlish harangue? Because justice begins when you turn away from whatever inspires judgment in you. Wherever you seek revenge, you cannot rule justly.

Victims deserve justice, but a person animated by a victim mentality does not understand and in fact actively undermines justice.

Whatever you can only describe in terms of “they,” or “society,” the “status quo,” and so on, is simply not for you. Whatever you can only describe vaguely is, by definition, not your business.

Let’s dispense with uncomfortable and inconvenient realities right now.

Disparities are not evidence of discrimination.
Poverty is not evidence of oppression.
Rejection is not evidence of “phobia.”

And now a necessary twisting of the knife.

Sometimes people simply dislike you for who you are, and it has nothing to do with your “demographic markers.”

Sometimes, bad experiences, bad relationships, bad employers, bad treatment, and a bad life are nobody else’s fault but your own.

And now, the worst possible honest thing I could say:

Sometimes, “injustice” is what people call it when they realize the world doesn’t see them as special.

I’ve said all this for one simple reason: being a just ruler means ruling justly over your own life. Settling disputes and grievances in your own heart. If you are always ruling in favor of yourself, you are inculcating the habit of finding fault with others, and fault with “the world.”

But if you convict society, or men, or women, or whatever subcategory thereof, this already makes a mockery of your courtroom: how is the verdict and sentence enforced? How does the world pay you the fine of a better life after it’s been convicted of treating you unfairly?

If you must pass judgment, pass it on yourself. Because you can discover the error, the injury that followed from it, and the proper course of action to set things right again.

You can gauge the costs, you can estimate the time, you can even sentence yourself to community service if you see that as the wisest path to reform.

This is all undeniably within your power.

Aha, but here we are: the exercise of power must be cultivated! People prefer to judge the world, to judge people they cannot possibly punish, because to do so is the exercise of fantasy and whimsy!

Demand reform from yourself, and you will see, in horror and shame, the weak and spineless worm you have become through indolence and self indulgence.

To be just, look at the state of affairs, and make the proper demands of the party who can actually be held responsible: yourself. Work out whatever arrangement is both adequate and bearable, and get to work. Get to work, and put the world and its injustices out of your head. Follow the laws of your conscience, and see that it never drags you into court again.

In business, be competent.

If there is a miracle cure for whatever is wrong in your life, on any level, it is the cultivation of excellence.

Become more skilled, more effective, and more efficient, and watch your dreams come true. Watch your very dreams improve in clarity, achievability, and even quality.

Striving to be a better human being means striving to perform each and every activity competently.

What is competence? Having what it takes to do whatever it takes to get the job done. To produce a result. To meet the demand for effort, resources, or attention with the appropriate supply.

Life is demanding. Life is difficult. However, in just the same way that a person can grow stronger until what was once a heavy weight feels almost feather-like in the gripping hand, the difficulty of life itself can decrease into relative insignificance when you pay enough attention to your overall level of skill at the specific tasks life confronts you with.

The same way that water conforms, without the slightest resistance, to the shape of its vessel and the influence of its environment, a competent person conforms to an environment of expectations.

Unless we sincerely wish to each go our own way in the wilderness, we have to work together. That means considering the needs of others, and imposing some degree of structure in an effort to maintain the flow of exchange between us all – in other words, human civilization.

In view of what has been said so far about competence, I feel that something important is missing. A foggy cloud of “so what” hangs over it all. Let me try to burn it off with something a bit more personally relevant.

The heart of competence is the notion that you matter.
You are a subject exerting agency in the world.
You have the power to achieve a result.
You are a cause and not merely an effect.

You are more than a cog in a machine,
more than the person occupying your current address,

more than a man or woman
belonging to such and such ethnic background,
religious affiliation,
national identity,
sexual orientation,
age,
height
and weight.

You are more than a number or a pawn in someone else’s game…

…If you choose to be.

If. You. Choose.

You are a plot of land. Tend to it like a garden, or it will fill up all by itself, but only with weeds. There will be life, there will be activity, there will be community, beliefs, behaviors, friends, family, and all the rest – but it will all merely happen to you, and it will be mediocre.

The perception that it does all happen seemingly by itself can lull you into a melancholic stupor. Here I am, a product of circumstance. Unsure if I belong, unsure if I am worthy, unsure if I am necessary and good.

The world does not tell you that you matter. It doesn’t make room for you (it does, but you have never known a world without you in it, so you never saw the displacement caused by your arrival and sustained presence). It appears to go on perfectly well without you, to the point that you might even question if you have anything to contribute to it.

The reason why we need competence the same way we need truthfulness, fairness, kindness, self knowledge, and connection to what is tactile and tangible, is that life does not make sense without it.

See yourself as a cause, not an effect, and you will start to notice countless missing pieces in your world. Countless little spots in the garden where a flowerbed, or a fruit bearing tree, or shrub might go. You learn to identify and respond to vacancies: perhaps you fill them, perhaps you defend them from being filled, but you exercise power of your own in either case.

Now, life has meaning because your presence or absence has meaning. And, the more skilled you become, the more consequential your presence or absence becomes.

In action, watch the timing.

Timing is a necessary piece of competence: if what you do matters, then when you do it matters every bit as much. There is no what without a when, anymore than there can be musical rhythm without musical pitch. One requires the other and is literally unimaginable without the other.

To pay attention to timing is not easy: it requires focus. Response time is a proxy for focus. And, what does it mean to focus? Your attention is in one place. That place may be a ping pong table during a match, or it may be a thought in your mind. Either way, if you fail to seize an opportunity at the critical moment, you can lose whatever is at stake.

And there is that beautiful word: stake. Actions matter, and timing matters, because we are indeed at war. In every moment, hour after hour, day after day, victory and defeat are at stake. Everyone who loses an argument, the attention of a crush, another person’s trust, a match, a duel, or a war is someone who committed a critical error. An error of action, and an error of timing.

Similarly to my point about honesty, timing must be taken seriously because you can still lose your life even when paying perfect attention to the timing. In what world, then, do you have the luxury of flouting it?

Your wife tells you she loves you and you are silent. You tell your friend you’ll be right there, and 20 minutes go by in idleness. You tell someone “I’ll do it tonight,” but another month goes by. The baseball is thrown from the pitcher’s mound, the sword is drawn from the sheath, the car in front slams on the brakes… and you are somewhere else.

It doesn’t matter where your mind was – it wasn’t where it needed to be. One of many possible beginnings of wisdom is the realization we are all of us chattel slaves before the whip of time.

It is the most impressive person who has paid time its due so completely and so wisely that he or she can sit in quiet repose and engage in deep thought. Whether this occurs at the start or end of the day, space to truly think is afforded to the person with an uncluttered mind, which can only mean an uncluttered life.

Water flows, but not only water: life’s unceasing demands for a response, for attention. To the focused, humble, and responsive person, these waves of events are like the water at low tide on a calm beach, lapping at the shore.

For the person who arrogantly chooses the private world of fantasy and ignores the world, dissociates from it, minimizes and dismisses it, the waves of the world are always crashing overhead. Frustrated employers, disappointed and disappearing friends, nagging girlfriends, a car that looks like someone is living in it – these belong to the person living in his head, fumbling handoff after handoff in the real world.

People who’ve never actually read “eastern philosophy,” or who approach it like a drug addict (thinking it will “make them feel good”) have hallucinated that it preaches unconditional love and acceptance. People make similar hallucinations about Christianity. This is rubbish. Why would the great sage tell you to pay attention and watch the timing if nothing really mattered, and, no matter what you do, everything is okay, and the Tao or some great spirit will always love you anyway?

Living life well means waking up to the fact that your life can be squandered. Through arrogance, through servility, through cowardice, through indolence, lack of focus and lack of earnestness.

Wake up, man up, and take this life seriously. Every single second counts. And, by seriousness I don’t mean drudgery. I mean, exchange the blissful ignorance of childhood for the hard won joy of a life hardened and sharpened by skills and commitments.

Learn to play this game of life to the point where you are retiring at the end of each day with something to be proud of. Set a high bar, but permit yourself every positive emotion at the reaching for and grasping and exceeding of that bar. Children think happiness is inherent, unconditional, and eternal. Adults understand that satisfaction must be won daily and even hourly.

As Leo Tolstoy once wrote, the most important thing can only be whatever and whoever is before you now, and the most important thing to do can only be to do him good. Therefore, watch the timing.

No fight: no blame.

The genius of this text is in what it promises: freedom from self-created problems. Not perfection, not bliss (I gag at the word), not the world living in peace – but you putting an end, once and for all, to the war between you and yourself, you and your own life.

If you don’t cause problems, nobody will hold you to account. Nobody will come after you, ostracize you, or punish you.

Now, of course, there are bad people in the world who will do all those things to you no matter what you do, precisely because they are bad people.

When you have done nothing wrong, and you know it, you can stand up to such people easily, because all the layers of yourself are in alignment – your mouth is not merely a press secretary in a perpetual state of running cover for a dishonest and incompetent politician. You are singular, hiding nothing beneath the surface that would contradict the exterior were it to be exposed. Whatever is beneath the surface is simply private, but not a secret. This is the only state in which you can stand up straight and face the wickedness of other people.

I said face it, not fight it.

If you find yourself fighting with people, you are to blame. Remember? No fight: no blame.

Someone who has accepted reality is, almost by definition, not in an active state of combat with it. Not adversarial! When you are at peace, you can tell when someone else is looking for a fight. You can spot it from a distance. And, being the person who values peace, you don’t engage with quarrelsome people.

Let them find each other.

Let them have to look far and wide before they find one, to the point that the fight goes out of them in the search for a fight.

But what to do when you inevitably encounter them?

One does not end conflicts by validating the impulse to seek conflict. However, conflict will quickly intensify when the aggressor feels dismissed or minimized. Conflict, then, comes to an end when it is recognized as unnecessary. Reframe the interaction, rather than seek to win the contest. If you win, you make a loser of your counterpart. A loser is someone with something to prove: the best way to guarantee a fight tomorrow is to win one today, and this is far from the worst possible outcome.

Making conflict unnecessary means lowering the price of significance for the other party.

What does that mean?

People want to get into fights because they want to prove that they matter.

People cannot live without the felt sense, daily and hourly, that their lives are significant: do not make anyone go to desperate and dangerous lengths to obtain it.

Validating someone else’s perspective does not mean agreeing with it! It means taking it seriously, responding in earnest, and actively, visibly striving to understand it. Not claiming to already understand it (this is minimizing), not refusing to try to understand it (this is dismissive), and not telling someone why they’re wrong (making them the loser of the interaction) – but thinking through their position, out loud, in real time. This is what tells someone else that they are worthy of consideration.

This has to be practiced intentionally. Usually, when we hear a differing perspective, we are tempted to assert our own. I am guilty of this far too often. Is there anyone who cannot say, “I could be a better listener?” Listening is so hard because we make it hard. We make it about giving away our power, forcing ourselves to behave in ways we don’t find natural, and least appealing of all, sitting there while someone else spews a whole bunch of nonsense that we instantly and intensely disagree with.

My friend, I am telling you, if the world of wars is going to come to an end, whatever you claim to find natural, that nonetheless actively and materially perpetuates the disharmony, has to be reformed by the application of method. You cannot, and I mean this – you cannot simply be. This is the difference between immaturity and maturity, a wilderness of weeds and a beautiful garden: the moderating influence of civilization. Are you civilized? Are you a paragon of virtue and civility? Or are you, pardon me, an insufferable and grating hyena? If it is the latter, I promise you, you know it. You know damn well.

In closing, whatever you resist, refuse, run away from, and refute, either in yourself, your life, or, especially, in other people, is the thing standing between you and a water-like flowing of focus and activity: the thing between you and the further cultivation of your highest potential.

However principled you may feel for shutting out what you deem to be beneath you, I submit to you that what you are really doing is rationalizing the avoidance of something that you lack the requisite skill to engage with productively.

To be blunt, in the hope of shattering an utterly unproductive wall of denial, it is you who is beneath what you claim to be beneath you. The person who is truly above something knows exactly what to do when he or she encounters it, and does so without reservation.

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things,
And does not strive.
It flows in places men reject,
And thus is like the Tao.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

Less Theory, More Practice: applying the Tao Te Ching to a modern life

Part 1: Mortality

When I was a small child, I was wildly imaginative (were you the same way?). I would draw, play with toys, or simply project my imaginings onto the sky while gazing up at clouds, or into the cityscapes visible through car windows as my mom or dad drove me and my brother around town.

Because I was raised by and around kind people who understood the needs of children, I don’t recall anybody ever interjecting “that’s not real!” as a way of rudely shattering the fantasy. I was free to indulge my imagination in its various aspects, knowingly moving away from passive observation of reality and toward willful embellishments.

Now, I’m no psychologist, but I think kids can easily return to objective reality when their reality feels safe. I wasn’t running away, but simply at play. Having fun. My mind might have been a hard act to follow, but my “real life” was filled with gentle people who loved and encouraged me. And, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge my undying gratitude for that now.

It’s when reality becomes unstomachable, however, that fantasy slowly becomes a surrogate. A step parent. A delusion. Permanent, or at least the subject of an attempt at permanence.

But delusion is more widespread than anyone would like to think, touching almost all of us in some way.

How can I say that?

Because I can say that there are major aspects of reality that people have not come to accept, are not even on their way to accepting, and maintain their distance from them with the daily use of fantasy.

I’m talking of course about the reality of death. The impermanence of all life, and the utter insignificance of individuals and even entire species of living things against the backdrop of mountains and oceans, to say nothing of the birth and death of entire stars, planets, and moons.

The easy thing to do, what I imagine most of us do in some way, is meet all that with hand waiving – how can I possibly wrap my mind around all that? Why should I concern myself with it? It just makes me depressed (alternatively, with dissociative awe).

Well, is it any different to ask why a powerless child should face the reality that his or her parents hate each other and probably won’t be married much longer?

We can look at all kinds of ugly or disempowering realities and recognize that individuals fare best when they face facts, and take back their lives from the paralysis so easily induced by what is often called fate.

A compassionate and caring person can easily recognize that it may take years for a person in a tough spot to gather the strength, maturity, and will to make sense of their life, but that something critical has been missed if this work is never undertaken.

And so, the right thing to do, I hope you can agree, is to apply the same reasoning to the facts of life and death themselves. But, not in a grand sense: it must be completely personal, completely intimate. My one short life, my ultimate insignificance, my inevitable death.

Even typing these words now is difficult!

Even sitting here on a sunny afternoon idly typing my thoughts into a doc, I shudder at the thought and look for a way out – a way out of even saying it with my thumbs to the screen of a phone!

When he saw the body of his slain companion, Gilgamesh the great King of Uruk said, unforgettably,

Must I be like that? Must I die, too?

Yes. Yes.

And once this reality has been accepted (a subject far too big for not just a weekly newsletter but for a writer of my meager stature), a degree of make believe comes, at last, to an end.

The same way I no longer imagine Wolverine leaping out from behind a copymat as my mom drives me past it on the way home from school, I can no longer imagine, I can feel the illusions melting away as I reconcile myself to reality.

Rather than be caught between passive observation and active hallucination, observation goads to action.

What sorts of behaviors come to and, and what take their place, as reality takes the place of fantasy?

We are now ready to read chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching, now ready to consider the answer offered by an ancient Chinese sage named Lao Tzu. I’m confident you will soon see why.

Part 2: Eternal Creation, Ephemeral Creatures

SEVEN

Heaven and earth last forever.
Why do heaven and earth last forever?
They are unborn,
So ever living.
The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead.
He is detached, thus at one with all.
Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.

We could begin by breaking up the short chapter in 2 ideas: the first 4 lines indirectly remind us of our mortality, the second 3 lines tell us how a wise person would make use of this information.

Regarding the first 3 lines, there is more to say than you might think. By all means, stop to contemplate the natural world, the world beyond human sociopolitical affairs, and be moved to awe. Let it inspire you, relax you, and restore you. The world is vast and beautiful – don’t miss out on even brief and frequent moments of observation: it’s downright good for you.

But I would be participating in something quite dishonest to leave it at that – if I was to simply join the bandwagon of nature worship.

To experience nature as a kind of companion – wise, gentle, and transcending – is the greatest luxury and privilege imaginable. A luxury afforded to you and me solely by the achievements and industry of humankind.

Nature is not “calm,” “peaceful,” and “rejuvenating” to human populations without ways of dealing with food, shelter, disease, injury, and waste management, just to name a few things.

Only when we have something called civilization does nature become, by contrast, quieter, more meaningful, and somehow instructive.

If nature is static, fixed, and humanity is what changes, our perspective on nature is a necessary consequence of where we’re at with ourselves at this moment – at this phase in our evolution.

My point is simply this: we, through a combination of time, discovery, striving, ingenuity, dumb luck, perseverance, imagination, optimism, and obsession, have raised ourselves up to a point where nature is no longer an enemy but a friend, a teacher, a resource, and a reminder of what matters.

With that last paragraph in mind, do not denigrate yourself and humanity as a whole when you admire nature: your capacity for admiration is, for precisely the reasons I just explained, evidence of something legitimately admirable on your part.

What you should feel, rather than inferiority, is simply distinction. Difference. Contrast.

Let me now list many of the differences that will inevitably sound denigrating but are simply truths, truths that are inescapable when comparing ourselves to nature.

Nature is eternal, while you are ephemeral. Nature is overpowering and irresistible while you are weak and inconsequential. Nature is hard and unfeeling while you are soft and sensitive. Nature is steadfast while you are capricious and whimsical.

But do not stop there: nature is seemingly blind and automatic while you gaze in contemplation and weigh your options. Nature is ruthless while you have mercy, feel pity, and offer second chances. Nature consumes the weak while you cherish and preserve what would be obliterated without your interventions. Nature simply is, while you yearn for what you might become. Nature merely reproduces, while you fall in love. Nature kills, and so do you, but you alone bury and grieve and remember the dead. You may even call nature a god, but you alone seek and worship your god.

In many ways, you are nothing like the world. And by allowing yourself to perceive these differences without feelings of self recrimination, you can grow wise.

And this plays into what I want to say about the second half – what to do with a life that is by definition doomed to death.

Can I be a bit obvious, maybe even didactic? May I even risk being redundant? The point of comparison is to highlight differences. And, why highlight differences? One reason would be to better understand your own situation and needs. To make better sense of your life by understanding what you are and what you’re not.

Part 3: A Sage Does Not Compete

What does the sage do differently from the rest of us, as a direct result of better understanding both nature and himself? We are told that

The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead.

What do you do when you realize you’re not running a race? You slow down. And why can it be said that life isn’t a race? Because it is a farce to compete with people who are about to be annihilated, only moments before or after your own annihilation.

The sage is ahead of those still running, because he has finished the race, or rather is finished with racing.

Now, a word about competitive activities. As long as they have meaning to you, continue them. Their meaning may evolve for you, also. You may be in a place where dullness and indolence have to be burned up in some passionate striving. You may have to prove yourself, to cultivate yourself, to become capable of the rigor necessary to best your betters. So be it. There is great beauty and dignity in contests of skill, in discipline and sacrifice, and even in the yearning for glory and the hatred of one’s opponents. There is of course great ugliness in it, too. But both are united by greatness.

But a sage is something more than a great man or woman. You cannot become great without a persistent drive to do so. You have to want it, even to need it.

A sage does not need it.

A sage may do great things, but the attention is always on the quality of the work, the care and thoroughness of the work. The attention is never on the fame, glory, or leverage that could be obtained by doing great things.

A sage is ahead of others because he is not in competition with anyone. This is not fluff: there is so much more that can be done when you don’t need credit, when you don’t even need to be seen doing it. Like someone who paints over graffiti while everyone else is asleep or quietly supports others to help them achieve their own goals, there is an entire world of accomplishment and virtue that opens up the moment you drop the requirement of putting everything on a scoreboard.

Someone without the need to compete and win can do thankless but necessary work without tiring, since the will to continue is not supplied in the form of recognition or encouragement.

For example, when I renewed my commitment to reading books, I began by setting a goal of X pages per day, to make sure I finished each book within 7-10 days. I quickly realized this was arbitrary, impossible, and meaningless.

The point was to understand the ideas in the books as completely as possible, not to finish as many books as possible. I wasn’t reading to read, I was reading to become more knowledgeable and cultivated. To deepen my thinking and understanding of the world. This was not about chasing the dopamine of task completion, but the slow burn of maturation.

At some point I slowed down to clarify my motives: what mattered was that I established and maintained a reading habit, not that I crossed some random finish line by a certain date.

It also didn’t matter if I pulled ahead of some other randomly selected person, either.

Truth be told, I don’t want to become the most knowledgeable person about any subject, because I would be nothing but disappointed to receive confirmation that there was truly nothing left to do or learn: “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can achieve no more.”

I would hate to be trapped in a world so petty and small that it could be conquered by me.

Now I eat information until I’m full, so to speak, and then I rest my brain. I take it in. I let the revelations soak into the soil and grow the garden of my mind. I let the same waters of knowledge erode the sand castles of imagination and whimsy. It feels contemplative and earnest, not shallow and forceful.

By settling into a natural place, I have nothing to keep up with, no whip at my back, only curiosity backed by commitment. This is sustainable, sane, and kind.

Part 4: A Sage Is Not An Addict

He is detached, thus at one with all.

Words like “detached,” or the term “non-attachment” can be quite tricky to interpret correctly. The temptation to make a bit of a straw man and say, for example, “oh, so we shouldn’t care about other people, have relationships, or feel sympathy and empathy and compassion,” or some version of this, is understandable. It’s understandable because it’s easy to look at things in a binary way: caring or uncaring.

And, that’s the first problem: conflating non-attachment with being uncaring. In reality, the unattached person is the most sincerely caring person you could ever encounter or, hopefully, become.

Why?

Let’s answer this by explaining what we mean by “attached” in this context. Side note, if you’re up on attachment theory and relationship psychology more broadly: unattached, non-attachment etc refers to something closer to “secure attachment style,” not “avoidant attachment.”

Attachment is an insecure clinging. An unhealthy preoccupation. An addiction. Yes, ultimately what I mean when I say “attached” is that a person is addicted to other people.

A sage is not an addict, but “one with all.” He is one with all precisely because he is not addicted to any.

To understand this short sentence, then, is to understand addiction broadly: when someone cannot function without the presence of something else, something that they do not truly need but upon which they have nonetheless become dependent. Addictions are things we would be better off without. Stronger and healthier and saner without. They are not legitimate needs, but closer to a symbiotic parasite: they do something for us, yes, but at a cost only a fool would knowingly pay.

The key word is “knowingly.” All addictions hide behind not only the benefits they procure but their mind numbing and deluding effects as well. Once a path has been walked with the help of the crutch or the cane of an addictive substance, the craving for it now arises in tandem with difficulties. All paths become unthinkably difficult without the crutch of this companion. In time, people forget what it feels like to stand tall on their own.

People can be addicted to other people, too: unable to stand upright without the supply of their approval, their values, their layers of identity in the form of ethnicity, culture, religion, politics, class, education, and profession.

In a very real way, people turn down the frightening journey of discovering their true selves for the comfort of a well defined place in the crowd, no matter how much they tell themselves they’re different, no matter how far to the margin of whatever completely mainstream group they find themselves.

I should clarify something: of course we are social creatures and live in groups. Of course it is perfectly natural that the group would convey culture to the individual on every level.

This is, undeniably, normal, natural, and healthy. But the group is simply an aggregate of individuals.

No matter how many questions of how to live life appear to be answered for you by society, you still have to act out these values all by yourself from one moment to the next, from one decision to the next.

In other words, yes the supply of “group think” is everywhere, but until you reduce your own demand for it, you are attached to it. Unduly supported it. Addicted to it. And as long as this is the case, there will be much within you that is both weak and unprocessed. And beyond that, it will be almost invisible to you.

This is something I have experience with: the need to labor toward self discovery.

I had to sort out for myself the difference between what I wanted and what I thought “they” would approve of.

Did I actually dislike somebody or was I merely uncomfortable or insecure around them?

Was there something in them I found intolerable, or did I see the very thing that I harbored within myself that I dare not reveal?

Was my rejection of others no different from driving out of the village scapegoat in ancient times, the killing of a sacrificial victim made to stand in for the sins of the collective?

Did I want to be close to others, or did I just want to relieve the discomfort of loneliness?

Was I there to give, or to get?

In this last question, the addictive nature should be seen clearly. In all of these little aphorisms, what is shown in selfishness, consumerism, self gratification. Attachment. There is no real interest in other people here at all.

To become a sage, at least to become more sage like than before, means to become interested in others the way someone is interested in a garden from which they cannot eat.

A sage stands tall in his or her individuality, not as an act of rebellion against the group, but as someone who has developed completely.

If I know who I am, and I’m not taking my cues from others, then the diversity of perspectives and temperaments out there is not confusing or maddening but interesting. I can see my own humanity mirrored in others. I can be happy for their happiness, their relationships, their stable lives, their accomplishments, their intelligence, everything that makes them exceptional, or average, or even agitated and dysfunctional. I can see it all and see a human just like me but simply tilted a few degrees in another direction.

When I suffered from addictions, my life shrunk to the size of the addiction: my world was a place where I purchased, consumed, experienced the world through the lens of and suffered on account of the substances.

Little by little they eclipsed everything: responsibilities, relationships, interests, ideas, and even self preservation.

My life did nothing but continuously shrink under their influence: even since I broke my attachment to them, and completely removed them, my life has done nothing but expand.

Would I say that I am now “one with all?”

Goodness, no. Run from the person who says, “I am one with all.”

Deny him parole. Don’t join his sex cult.

What I would say is I’m free to own my perspectival reality: right in some ways, wrong in others, with some ever widening level of wiggle room to become more right and less wrong over time.

Because I take responsibility for the direction of my journey and the spirit in which I undertake it, and because I know how much determination, earnestness, and maturity that takes (because I had to cultivate all three, and was born with none of them), I mostly leave others in peace. I leave them to the management of their own lives, for better or worse.

Nobody else can live my life for me. Why would I be able to live someone else’s for them?

You probably noticed I said I “mostly leave others in peace.” Mostly? Because making no interventions at all actually is the same thing as being totally uncaring and totally cowardly.

You see someone walking into the street with their headphones on, buried in their phone, and a car is coming – do you leave them in peace because you are nobody to interfere?

I hope not.

All of my improvements were, in some way, responses to the world showing me that I wasn’t measuring up.

Sometimes it did so gently, but mostly it was painful. I would not have perceived the need for change were it to be painless. Thank God, then, for pain.

I’m just as much a part of other people’s lives as they are of mine – it would be irrational to think others don’t need corrective feedback even though I do, and I benefit from it.

For most people, it is a mixture of attachment and cowardice that hides behind their “live and let live” slogans. They are filled with judgments, frustrations, and compromised standards and boundaries, but they simply do not know how to confront problems in their relationships, or excise people they find distasteful, disagreeable, or immoral.

They don’t know how to say no. They think being a good friend means saying yes, putting your feelings aside, and capitulating to the needs of the squeakiest wheel.

“One with all” means I do not fear you. I don’t live in fear of you disagreeing with or disliking or misunderstanding me or something I say or do.

I’m prepared both to defend a position and adjust when I see compelling evidence that an error was committed. It’s not that I’m so sure that I’m right – I’m willing to jump in, engage fully, and discover where and how I am wrong. Specifically. Sitting on the sidelines, afraid of the disapproval of others, you may know something is missing, but no one has found and integrated that missing something while merely looking on as a spectator.

Part 5: A Sage Is Not Selfish

Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.

Weak, degenerative people seek fulfillment through self gratification (addictions in various forms).

Strong, healthy people attain fulfillment by contributing to the welfare of others. What they do for themselves is maintain themselves.

Life grows in scope, in value, in happiness, in meaning, by growing one’s capacity to contribute, and by repeatedly delivering those contributions into the lives of others.

Contributing to the welfare of others can take many forms – I will make no effort to enumerate even a partial list now. As a rule, however, it cannot damage or diminish another person in any way. Meaning, if you contribute by becoming a crutch that they lean on, because this makes you feel useful, it is not useful to them, because it is making them weak and dependent.

In my experience, being a good person means doing a whole lot of what looks like nothing. Minding your own business, but minding it well. Becoming meticulous, excellent, restrained, fastidious and frugal. There is more to say about human excellence elsewhere, but I want to focus on selfless action for the time being.

It is not going around and trying to be helpful. There is no “going around” at all. There is, in fact, nothing driving you to go do this or that at all – there is the perception of situations and events, the instinctive awareness of what is called for in that moment, and the fluid transition from observation to action.

The lack of self seeking is what makes it selfless: not some very flattering campaign of bringing flowers to the sick and kissing babies and letting people know “you’re here for them.”

Less letting people know, and more being there.

Less jumping in, and more watching and waiting.

Letting others find their footing, find their words, and find their way, but quietly keeping an eye on it all, so as not to miss the moment of action when action is called for.

It’s called for less often than you probably think, unless this person we’re talking about is your own infant child.

If you want to do nice things for others because you’re temperamentally inclined to do so, you shouldn’t be looking for permission from this newsletter: for God’s sake go and be good. But do it because it fulfills your nature, which is actually the best bit of all the good it does for you: to be you, through and through, and no one else.

That leads me to another important point.

Do good because you’re a do-gooder.

Do good because you wish to learn how to do good.

Do good because you need to know you’re capable of doing more than bad.

Do good because you want to find out whether or not it will make you happier.

Do good, actually, because you understand that you expect it of yourself and your own approval or disapproval is the single most important thing in your life.

But do not do good to make others like you, respect you, sleep with you, admire you, forgive you, hire you, or choose you over someone else.

It’s the “so that they will” that has to go. The neediness. The addictive craving. The manipulative, covert bartering. The resentment when they don’t do what you want, even though you bent over backwards. The contemptible, sniveling longing for recognition. This is trash. Trash.

The proper understanding of selfless action is that it is the fruit born of first ending your competitive relationship with others and then ending your unhealthy attachments to others.

How can you help people when you think their success is a threat to yours? How can you truly come to understand others, and their unique needs, when you derive your sense of self from their example?

When you find and lay claim to the path that is only available to you, competition ends.

When you cast off all forms of crutches and develop the strength to stand in your own nuanced and irreducibly complex individuality, attachments end, too.

Now you can see what others need, because they are struggling along a path you yourself have walked successfully.

You can see what would be helpful, what would be enabling, what would be superficially pleasant but ultimately irrelevant – you see a great deal, and you see it clearly: you are now, legitimately, a force for good in the world.

Part 6: Conclusion

We covered so much today, and I learned a great deal in the process of finding the words for this article. I looked at the lines of Chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching and I saw a great task before me: show everyone the through line that connects our mortality, the grandeur of nature, and the three characteristics of a sagely life laid out here – life beyond competition, beyond attachments, and beyond self interest.

The simple fact that our time is limited is enough to justify the undertaking of sorting this all out – how ought we to feel about our place in the world? How ought we relate to one another? What should we seek in the actions we take? What will make the difference between a life spent wisely and a life wasted?

I can now say this much: a life of denial, insecurity, desperate clinging, and petty one-upmanship just is certainly the latter. The former is the path of strength, dignity, and respect. Out of these three grow the virtues of acceptance, caring, and contribution.

I hope you will reflect on what we have discussed here today, and I wish you the courage to do so.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

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The Weak Have Desires, The Strong Have Purpose

Welcome back.

Today, we start with a quote from anthropologist Ralph Linton, taken from his text The Study of Man. I’ll reproduce the quote first and provide analysis after:

This tendency toward the unnecessary and in some cases even injurious elaboration of culture is one of the most significant phenomena of human life. It proves that the development of culture has become an end in itself. Man may be a rational being, but he is certainly not a utilitarian one. The constant revision and expansion of his social heredity is a result of some inner drive, not of necessity. …it seems possible that the human capacity for being bored, rather than man’s social or cultural needs lies at the root of man’s cultural advance. (p.184-5, Ralph Linton, The Study of Man)

Read the first sentence again: this tendency toward the unnecessary and in some cases even injurious elaboration of culture is one of the most significant phenomena of human life.

“Injurious elaboration of culture.”

Let me paraphrase: the same way that a moth is hardwired to use a light source to orient itself in flight, and cannot distinguish between the moon and a candle, and thus cannot avoid burning itself…

…it seems possible that humans are hardwired to revise and expand upon their inherited social systems, and cannot distinguish between what works just fine and what could be better. Thus, we can’t quite steer clear from “injurious elaborations of culture.

To paraphrase again: boredom leads people to do things that are unwise, on both a personal and societal scale.

What is wisdom? The capacity to differentiate between what is truly beneficial and what is merely tempting. What is necessary and edifying and what is unnecessary and injurious.

Philosophy (the love of wisdom) is the enterprise of installing better software in our malleable minds – updates that can tell the moon from a candle, an opportunity from a trap, selfishness from self respect.

And this is why I focus as much as I do on the Tao Te Ching: it seems dead set on communicating the necessity of knowing when to stop. How to become someone who instinctively knows where the limits are before they are exceeded.

It immerses you in the attitude of a wise person, and, if you stay in it long enough, internalizing and practicing it diligently, you become wise too. Doing less of what is unnecessary, the requisite attention, energy, and will to do what is necessary is available more often and in greater supply.

Today, I want to dissect chapter 3. You’ll see why in a moment. It contains some truly puzzling phrases that demand interpretation but yield correspondingly deep insights.

Chapter 3

Not exalting the gifted prevents quarreling.
Not collecting treasures prevents stealing.
Not seeing desirable things prevents confusion of the heart.

The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies,
By weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.
If people lack knowledge and desire,
Then intellectuals will not try to interfere.
If nothing is done, then all will be well.

When I was engaged in the work of memorizing the text, I began to take a special liking to the stanzas that seemed almost intentionally objectionable in the way they were worded.

People should lack knowledge? That is a good thing? We should do nothing? We should ignore the problems of the world? We should give up on our hopes and dreams and just eat to our hearts’ content?

It sure sounds like that’s what’s being said.

I can assure you, however, that Lao Tzu went to the appropriate lengths to divert shallow, reactive minds. These seemingly ridiculous statements that occasionally surface in the text are here, I believe, to attract those who are sincerely curious and willing to do the necessary heavy lifting, so to speak, to get at the truth, while putting off those unwilling to exercise their minds.

So, let’s begin. Let’s actually think, and grow from the labor of doing so, rather than simply consume the same trite drivel in new verbiage over and over again, atrophying from the lack of effort.

Not exalting the gifted prevents quarreling.

Let’s make sense of this by going back to the absolute basics. What do we want a society to be? Harmoniously integrated. We grant without question that there is a distribution of virtue: some are obviously better than others. Some are taller, stronger, faster, healthier, smarter, and even nobler than others: only the worst people deny this. What, then, is the best thing to do with the best of us?

If the goal is cohesion, integration, a society functioning as one organism, assigning the appropriate duties and resources to each component part, then exaltation does nothing to achieve this goal.

Exaltation actually separates the gifted from the rest, and puts a spotlight not on their achievements but on them. To exalt means to lift above the others. Why? So it can be seen and admired by all. Does that sound healthy and appropriate to you? To encourage people to think of some as above them, and themselves as necessarily inferior?

Is it socially responsible to encourage some people to feel superior and others inferior? Is it socially responsible to turn attention and praise into a currency with value, to be sought, traded, and expended for personal benefit?

Obviously not. We’re invited to consider how this path leads to division (quarreling), rather than cohesion.

What do I think we should do instead? Fair question, and I will answer it later, but not now. Now, we get clear about what does not and cannot possibly work. That’s always step 1.

Not collecting treasures prevents stealing.

It might not be obvious that exalting the gifted causes quarreling, but it should be obvious that stockpiling resources attracts desperate and unscrupulous people seeking resources.

What’s less obvious, though? That having to have (collecting treasures) isn’t that different from having to praise (exalting the gifted). If the best thing to do with the gifted is not to exalt them, then the best thing to do with treasures is not to collect them, and for the same reason.

Not seeing desirable things prevents confusion of the heart.

One more negation before we get into solutions, prescriptions made in the affirmative.

Where does confusion of the heart come from? From gazing upon something lovely and longing for it. Imagining you need it, feeling pained by your lack of it. Feeling that whatever you do have must not be good enough, if you feel this desire and longing in the face of what you do not possess.

This is confusion: not knowing where to go, being unsure of where you are, unsure of what you perceive. Possessed by fantasy, imagining yourself enhanced by the acquisition of more, and being increasingly lured into an imagined world. It should go without saying that living in imagination, in longing, in fantasy, does not make for coherent and sensible actions in the real world.

The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies,
By weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.

Paraphrase: the wise rule by putting energy into what is real, and ignoring what is not real.

What is wise is to invest your energy in what you have (stuffing bellies and strengthening bones), rather than chasing after and longing for what you don’t.

Before you entertain ideas of what’s missing in your life, experience what it feels like to be truly well nourished and strong. Learn to combine a rigorous exercise regimen with an appropriately robust diet. Learn how to sleep properly. How to drink water diligently and consistently, how to maintain mobility and flexibility and balance.

Instead of becoming enamored with the value in others and in objects, see value in yourself. Not in an egotistical way, which is actually seeking the approval of others and therefore valuing their opinions over your own, but in a responsible way. Extract all the gold from your own mine before envying another’s.

Said as directly as possible: draw all the strength, stability, health, capacity, confidence, and even beauty out of the resource that is your own body before you give a single thought to what you would demand of the world.

If people lack knowledge and desire,
Then intellectuals will not try to interfere.
If nothing is done, then all will be well.

People always have a hard time with these three lines, and it’s not hard to see why.

As is always the case with Lao Tzu, use the part that does make sense to decide the part that doesn’t: this never fails.

Let’s agree that interference is bad. In this context, it almost certainly means misguided, unhelpful, and possibly harmful and exploitative input from people who don’t really understand the subtleties of how to promote human flourishing.

And who are these people who are interfering? Intellectuals. People who understand things at the level of theory, policy, scripture, or even research, but by definition lack the grit that comes with a lifetime of practical application.

People animated by intellectual arrogance are inserting themselves into the affairs of others, both because they think they know better and because they wish to interfere, resulting in negative outcomes.

How are the people making themselves targets for meddling know-it-alls? With their own lack of self sufficiency, their own deluded ideas of utopia. A whole and healthy person has a purpose, a duty. A broken or halfway-there person has desires.

Grow sufficiently solid and strong, and you will simply see the unfolding of events before your eyes and respond to them as necessary: you have both the capacity and the availability to act, because your own needs have been fulfilled.

If you are incomplete, and unable to complete yourself, however, you will invariably be seeking the missing pieces outside of yourself. You know something’s missing, and you want it. This is what is meant by knowledge and desire.

Now, we can make sense of the last lines:

When people lack knowledge and desire,
Then intellectuals won’t try to interfere.

We can now paraphrase this, confidently:

If you properly care for yourself, you will not become a target for parasitic con artists who live off a society’s resources but only contribute theories that lead people in circles and ultimately to ruin.

If nothing is done, then all will be well.

If you’re walking up a staircase, with the landing at the top clearly in view, you know where you are going, and your body automatically responds to the command “climb the stairs.” If I were to ask you, what are you doing, you would probably answer in terms of why you were going where you appear to be going. What I doubt is that you would answer in terms of your knees, ankles, calves, quadriceps, hamstrings and gluteal muscles. I would assume you are consumed with ideas of purpose, rather than mechanics.

I’m not being pedantic: this is the meaning of non action, of saying “if nothing is done, all will be well.” If you are at a state where, once you understand what must be done, you simply do it, with the how relegated below the threshold of conscious awareness, too unremarkable to notice, then you yourself are well: you are a capable person. Nothing is done, but all is well. Actions are automatic, and only purpose is under consideration.

This level is only available to the person who has total command over the instruments of action, and this is why the wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies, by weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.

Without this bedrock of self sufficiency, we exalt the gifted, we collect treasures, and we see whatever we don’t possess as desirable.

When we are strong, we leave the gifted to their work. We appreciate art and all forms of finery, but do not feel the need to possess or stockpile it, because nothing in us is seeking enhancement by proxy. We don’t imagine another’s life to be better, or alternative circumstances to be more conducive to our happiness.

With a full belly and strong bones, we know that happiness comes from the knowledge and sensation of one’s ability to stand up to life, not from luxuriously hiding from it.

For this reason, those who have nothing to offer the world but false promises of utopia know that we are simply not in the market, and they keep moving.

This is how one steers clear of unnecessary and even injurious elaborations of culture: life honors the perfectly sane limits of the body, rather than the inexhaustible caprices of the mind.

Said another way, a person who truly works hard every day never encounters boredom, but only well deserved repose.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

The 3 Distinctions That Lead To Greater Self Confidence

Welcome back. Today, I’m going to discuss the not-so-secret secret sauce that everybody needs, but very few can explain how to get:

Self confidence.

It opens doors.
It makes you respectable and attractive.
It picks you back up when you hit the ground.
It gives you a forcefield against negative emotions.

I can remember when I didn’t have it, and all the ways I tried to compensate for that (they didn’t work).

I can remember what had to change before I could truly acquire it,

And I can see and appreciate all the ways in which I now live in a different world, living a different life, on account of finally having it.

The reason the confident and the unconfident person live in different worlds is because each sees the world differently:

Different perspectives cause different observations,
Different observations cause different conclusions,
Different conclusions cause different actions,
And different actions cause different results.

This is why I’m here to lay out the 3 distinctions that separate confident people from unconfident people:

It really is mental. Well, it begins that way. When you start enacting the new understanding I’m about to lay out, you’ll soon find everything changes, not just your thoughts.

Distinction One: preparation, not faith

Oxford Languages defines “confidence” as “the feeling of belief that one can rely on someone or something; firm trust.”

To be self confident, then, is to be convinced of oneself.

If you were going to make a significant purchase, what would convince you of your ability to do so, checking your account balance and reviewing other upcoming expenses, or quietly affirming to yourself “I am abundant, prosperous, and wealthy?”

The numbers adding up is what convinces you. This is why companies have finance and accounting departments: confidence comes from evidence, not faith.

When I lacked confidence, I would try to pantomime the behaviors of a more confident person. Sooner or later, however, I always self sabotaged. I self sabotaged because, deep down, I knew that I didn’t know what I was doing.

I was unprepared!

How did I remedy this?

There’s no shortcut for this, and that’s why it separates the committed from the merely wishful: I started putting in the time.

Let me give you some examples:

With respect to my musicianship, I began actually practicing my guitar to a metronome for a minimum of 30 minutes every day. I began reading through the sheet of music of, say, Mozart’s piano sonatas and John Coltrane’s saxophone solos.

In other words, I began to systematically learn new musical ideas, practice them to an unforgiving click that would reveal, rather than flatter, my technique, and, as a result, I began walking into my rehearsals feeling excited and intentional about getting into the material and applying what I was learning.

I wasn’t afraid to make mistakes, because I had clear targets for what I was trying to implement, and I was willing to make as many mistakes as it took before I could demonstrate a command of the material.

As a result, I take more risks, try things that push my limits, and feel pretty uninhibited about floating ideas about how my band might realize a particular song or evolve in general terms.

I don’t just have faith in myself: I have repeatedly gone through the process of introducing, developing, and mastering new ideas. Some of them work, some don’t, and I know how much practice it takes before you can really tell the difference.

I have the confidence to assert my ideas, even in an inchoate form, because I have the evidence of my previous successes and failures to lean on: I know I can do this.

It is the same with writing. Once I found templates and guidelines from credible sources, I just began implementing them, publishing short form content to X every day, and, eventually, newsletters like this one every week. Every time I hit “publish,” I’ve created more evidence that I can do this. This thing I’m doing now is a thing I have done before, and with each successive word that I write, each new word that I have to write becomes smaller and smaller in comparison to the total lifetime volume.

In the beginning, it was hard. But one article is evidence I can do it. Twenty articles is proof that I am doing it.

The same applies to weightlifting, or discussing a sensitive topic with my girlfriend: I’ve done this before, and the evidence of my past efforts both gives me the confidence to try now and the experience to avoid error. I have faith, yes, but it is faith informed by evidence.

How to generalize this and apply to your life:

Take some quiet time for yourself and write down in a doc or in a notebook about the areas where you don’t feel solid. There might be a couple, there might be several. Just pick one for now.

Write down all the “wins” you can think of for this topic. Let’s say you want to get your finances together, or feel together about them. Create a checklist of everything someone who feels confident about money would be able to say.

For example: how often do you check your balances? Do you have a place where all your recurring expenses are written down? Do you track your one-off spending? Are you saving money? Do you have a notice or a spreadsheet that’s set aside for this? Do you have a time set aside once a week for this?

When you are happy to answer all those questions, and this holds for six months, you have established some evidence that you have your finances together, and what you get in exchange for this is confidence. What you lose is anxiety.

Distinction Two: rules, not exceptions

Confidence is all about feeling solid, and that includes solid boundaries. Yes means yes, and no means no.

Do things you know you shouldn’t do,
Say things you know you don’t mean,
Get involved in situations you feel uneasy about,
And stifle the impulse to say or do something,

And you have only confused yourself.

On the one hand, it’s your life.
On the other, it doesn’t seem like you realize that.

Owning your life, really taking charge of things, is about defining the rules and sticking by them. Enforcing them.

Have you really quit, or just cut back?
Have you cut back, or are you just saying that?
Did you break up, but keep answering late night texts?
Did you say you wouldn’t eat that, and yet you are?
Are you uncomfortable with how much you’re on social media, but don’t really make changes?

All these situations undermine your sense of self confidence for two reasons:

You’re shutting out your intuitions.
You’re not abiding by your decisions.

Your intuitions should be the source of your rules.
Your decisions enforce them.

When I say that I live by my own rules, and I do, I don’t mean I break the rules of society, or that I care less about the consequences of my actions than others –

I mean what Socrates meant when he said he has an inner dæmon that calls bullshit when he says or does or is about to say or do something that he knows to be not quite correct and forthright but merely expedient. When you don’t know better, then you don’t know. You can’t act consistently with knowledge you don’t have. But if you do know, and here I’ll sound a bit authoritarian, you must obey. Not because someone else said so, but because you said so!

I cannot overstate how much self-confidence has followed as a result of knowing myself to be free from as many contradictions as possible. When I know I’m wrong, I admit it and correct course. When I think I might be right, I dare to speak up, find out, and abide by the results with dignity. When I know I’ve said or done something I find morally offensive, I apologize. Even more importantly, I do not apologize simply because someone else is offended: perhaps they are unreasonable, or have incomplete information. Sometimes, an explanation is needed, even if an apology is what is expected.

When I know I’ve done nothing wrong, I offer only information, courteously, but never an apology. One person’s indignance does not inspire my contrition, but my sense of right and wrong does.

This is called having some respect for yourself, having some boundaries, and having an internal locus of self worth.

I know right from wrong.
I know I have impulses that fly in the face of my moral judgments, and I know that I am the best person to police my impulses in the name of my moral judgments.

Kant said that only that action that runs contrary to inclination has moral worth, and this is what he meant: an adult is a responsible parent to the eternal child within. You do not capitulate to children, but you do negotiate with them: you set clear expectations and boundaries, and you make proper behavior as appealing and richly rewarded as possible. You overcome destructive impulses with sustained corrective pressure. You do this as an investment in the realization of their potential. This is love.

And, when you do this, you are a person with moral worth, and a deep wellspring of self confidence. A child without boundaries is anxious, not comfortable, not confident.

How to adapt this to your own life:

Make a list of the promises you keep breaking for yourself. Come up with concrete strategies for finally keeping them.

If you promised yourself less screen time, buy an exciting book, and set down the phone in another room until the next day.

Buy an actual alarm clock, instead of using your phone.

Purchase your next book when you’re within 100 pages of finishing the book you’re in now.

Treat the promises you make to yourself like contracts that would incur steep fines and reputational damage were they to be broken.

Distinction Three: inner, not outer.

Confident people are confident because they address underlying issues, rather than cover them up. Let me make one caveat here, worded as an additional distinction: not necessarily permanently resolved, but resolved into a plan. Resolved into a system where the problem is managed.

Some things can be overcome with a little planning and effort: go and overcome them (this is what distinction two is all about: “I solve all the problems I possibly can” is a rule everyone should follow).

Some things, however, need ongoing management. You can manage them from one of two places: the inside or the outside.

Eating right, drinking plenty of water, and getting plenty of rest and vigorous exercise would be managing your appearance from the inside. You look good because you are healthy. The exterior is an expression of the interior.

Managing it from the outside means covering up imperfections. Outer presentation is necessary and important, but you know exactly what I mean: can you say you show care and respect to your body and its needs?

Finances are the same way: are you working to increase your productive capacity, finding ways to offer more valuable skills to the marketplace, becoming more efficient and reliable, and adventurously expanding your horizons,

Or is your courageous plan to settle for second best so you can afford to retire?

You resolve money issues by inwardly transforming your capacity to generate it. For example, I write, and invest in every opportunity to become a better writer, so that writing can one day replace my day job. That’s an example of managing it from the inside. As a result, I don’t quite feel so self conscious about where I am in those terms, and I don’t unfavorably compare myself to others: I have a plan, a goal, and a system for getting me there. It will take time, but, here I am, putting in the time.

That’s inner work. And, here’s how it’s distinct from our first distinction (evidence, not faith):

Yes, all work creates persuasive evidence, but the confidence that comes from working to resolve rather than working to conceal comes from reducing the number of loose ends, rather than adding to a pile of wins.

You don’t win the game of fitness, or career, or relationships, or creative, artistic pursuits. You don’t win the game of learning. What you do is stay in the game. And you stay in the game by accounting for and managing the entropic forces that could eventually take you out of the game:

Hubris, apathy, futility, atrophy, boredom, cowardice.

Essentially, you stop trying, and one day you realize you’re no longer in the game of life. You’re replaying it in your head. Activity lives in memory.

The answer to this is to envelope whatever cannot be truly defeated into a system that can be run in perpetuity.

Some examples you can use?

Date night every week is a system.
Reading books and studying new things is a system.
Staying physically active is a system.
Calling and texting to check up on people is a system.
Having ongoing projects, the more difficult the better, is a system.
Always having something in your life that you’re taking to the next level is a system.
A newsletter every week, a handful of pithy tweets a day, is also a system.

I was born a mass of weakness, ignorance, incompetence, and selfishness: converting as much of that coal as possible into the diamonds of strength, knowledge, skill, and caring with the time I have available to me

Is a system.

And what confidence does that give me? The confidence that this will not be a wasted life.

Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.

Jas