Do nothing, and nothing is left undone

The Tao Te Ching is eighty-one short poems attributed to a man named Laozi, who may or may not have existed, from around the fourth century BCE. It's the second most translated book in the world after the Bible, and it says, in a hundred different ways, one thing most of us have never tried: stop forcing.

Its central idea is wu wei, usually translated as effortless action or non-doing. Not laziness. The opposite. Wu wei is acting in such harmony with the situation that the action seems to do itself. Water does it. Water doesn't fight the rock; it goes around, and in time the rock is gone. "Nothing in the world is softer than water, yet nothing is better at overcoming the hard."

Its picture of the ideal person is the uncarved block: plain, whole, unshaped by ambition and show, and therefore capable of anything. Its picture of the ideal leader is one whose people, when the work is done, say: we did it ourselves.

Here's why it belongs in the month of Awareness. Wu wei is impossible without attention. You can only act in harmony with a situation you've actually seen. Most forcing is blindness. We push because we haven't looked closely enough to find the place where a push isn't needed.

And it belongs in this year because, eighty-six days in, you've learned a great deal about effort, and the Tao is the counterweight. There's a kind of trying that works and a kind that doesn't. The first is like a gardener. The second is like someone pulling on the plants to make them grow faster. Laozi would ask which you've been doing.

"The tree that fills a man's arms grew from a tiny shoot." Small, patient, unforced. That's eighty-six days of a log.