Not Striving

In the Zen tradition, wu wei is a lovely phrase that means “not striving.” It refers to actions that occur naturally. I interpret it as “not trying to impose your own will onto a situation.”

This is a wonderful concept, a thought that I’m dealing with right now.

Lao Tzu summed it up beautifully with this line:

Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?

What a great idea.

And of course, the answer is no, I don’t have the patience to wait.

(I’m only half-kidding.)

We should all have patience to wait. To not strive. To not impose our own will. A lot of our problems would solve themselves, if we’re just patient. When we try to start fixing things immediately, we get in the way.

Here's an image for this: imagine there between where you are and where you want to be there is a wall. You know full well that the wall is scheduled to be demolished in a week. You can either wait for the week to pass, or you can spend 7 days hitting the wall with your head and then deluding yourself that you were the one who caused the wall to crumble.

If you had only waited patiently, you would have gotten through the week without giving yourself a headache.

Wu wei means non-striving.

Non-striving occurs when we get out of the way and stop fighting our destiny. (I dislike using that word — it makes me think of Darth Vader telling Luke it was his destiny to join the Dark Side.) While I dislike the notion of fate or destiny, it is nonetheless crucial that we stop fighting what we were meant to do in this life.

I experienced some things recently that I haven’t liked, but they happened, nonetheless.

I have the choice to strive against them, to fight against reality, or to accept these things.

I have the choice of saying, “This is true. This happened to me. I don’t know how I’m going to fix everything, but the answer will come. The right action will arise by itself.”

Related to this line of thought is karma. (What follows is different from the common, TV-land interpretation of karma.) Karma is the baggage you accumulate from the times that you were striving and you ought to have been not-striving and vice versa. When you strive to do something you know you shouldn't be doing, you produce the “bad” karma that will trip you up.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is related to this concept. It is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters to a young poet:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

We would be better off not striving. We would do ourselves a big favor by allowing the world to be as it is.

Spiritual-religious advice: Pick a day this week to devote 20 minutes to allowing the world to unfold as it may, without imposing your will on it.

Hand-Wash to Less Doubt

Are you the type of person who second-guesses yourself? If so, get a load of this.

(This isn’t exactly a spiritual-religious article, but it’s so cool that I wanted to share it with you.)

Scientists have long known that the act of ablution — of washing yourself — makes people feel like they’ve washed away their sins. (Think: Lady Macbeth.)

We know that washing the self is a metaphorical action associated with cleansing the soul. Literally, you wash away the dirt, the grime, the germs — but in a spiritual sense, you also wash away the darkness, the black spots on your conscience, to arrive at a “clean slate.” (On a related note, when I wash my car — which I do far too infrequently — I somehow feel cleaner.)

Washing not only makes clean, but it helps you feel cleansed.

Makes sense, right?

A recent study reveals something more about washing your hands: When you’re trying to make a decision you’re ambivalent about, if you wash your hands after making the decision, you’ll feel less ambivalent.

Spike W. S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz conducted the study at the University of Michigan and wrote about it in Science Magazine. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:

• The scientists asked undergraduate students to review a list of 30 CDs and rank them according to the top 10 they’d like to own.

• They had the students choose between the 5^th and 6^th CDs on their ranked list, in order to receive one of those as a free gift.

• The scientists asked some of the students to perform a seemingly unrelated task — rating soap. Some students were told to rate the soap only by looking at the packaging. Others rated the soap based on actually using it to wash their hands.

• They found that students who washed their hands with soap felt less uncertain about their selected free CDs. There was less beating themselves up about their decisions. The students who had only looked at the soap packaging second-guessed themselves about which CDs they had chosen.

The moral of the story is: wash your hands.

I know it sounds silly, but try it.

Hey, you eat food frequently, right? Do you ever second-guess where you should go to eat, or what you’re going to eat? How about this: for the next week, after you decide where or what you’ll eat, wash your hands and see if you experience less “post-decisional dissonance,” as the scientists call it. (Doesn’t post-decisional dissonance sound so much cooler than regret?)

Maybe washing creates a sense of calm?

Spiritual-religious, but really more hygienic advice: Wash.

LCK - The Burden of Imperfection

I wish I could do one single thing perfectly well, dear Lord, so I wouldn't get so discouraged at the many things I do so imperfectly. I eat too much; I get angry too often; I think unkind and impure thoughts more than I would like to admit; I am far too ambitious; too frequently I am jealous; and I am much less thoughtful than I know I ought to be.

After decades of trying to improve myself one would think I would be getting more things right than I do. The truth is, I am not actually inventing a whole lot of new and foolish things to do each day. Instead, I find myself simply repeating the same old foolish things I have done for a long time. I am having to re-learn those same old not-quite-learned lessons all over again. Practice has not made me more perfect. It has, instead, made me more discouraged and weary.

Be patient with me, O Lord. Help me to be more patient with myself as well. If I act foolishly, please help me to make that foolish action a solitary occurrence. Keep me from the embarrassment and suffering of revisiting and repeating old failures over and over again. I know that I am not yet what I ought to be. I just don't want to be stuck on what I once was.