Thoughts On Wu Wei

text-align: justify;”>In Chinese culture, the benefit of not trying too hard—of going with the flow” or being in the zone”—has long been appreciated by me. The jazz great Charlie Parker is said to have advised as­piring musicians, Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.” This same openness is also crucial in acting and other performing arts, which fundamentally rely on spontaneity and seemingly effortless responsiveness. A stand-up comedian who is not in the zone is not funny, and an actor who is not fully inhabiting his or her role comes across as wooden and fake. Explaining how to prepare for a role, the actor Michael Caine cautions that simply memorizing the script and trying to act it out step by step will never work; when it comes time for your line, the only way to bring it off authentically is to not try to remember it. You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. He is presumably new-minting the dialogue as if he himself just thought of it by listening and watching, as if it were all new to him, too. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously.”



Everyone enjoys these periods of deluge, but once you’re back in a dry spell the pattern seems wasteful and fundamentally unjust. There are too many potential dates when you can’t enjoy them all, and none when they are really needed. Serious reflection—and during a drought you have a lot of time to reflect—suggests a possi­ble reason for the pattern, or at least why it is so hard to consciously alter: the best way to get a date seems to be to not want to get a date. The problem is that it’s hard to know what to do with this knowl­edge. How do you make yourself not want something that you actu­ally _do _want?

For the most part, we are preoccupied with effort, the importance of _working, striving, _and trying. Three-year-olds attend drill sessions to get an edge on admission to the best primary school and then grow into hypercompetitive high school students popping Ritalin to enhance their test results and keep up with a brutal schedule of after-school activities. Both our personal and our professional lives increasingly revolve around a relentless quest for greater efficiency and higher productivity, crowding out leisure time, vacation, and simple un­structured pleasures. The result is that people of all ages spend their days stumbling around tethered umbilically to their smartphones, immersed in an endless stream of competitive games, e-mails, texts, tweets, dings, pings, and pokes, getting up too early, staying up too late, in the end somehow falling into a fitful sleep illuminated by the bright glow of tiny LCD screens.

Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of con­scious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing _harder _or moving _faster _in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive. This is because the problem of chok­ing or freezing up extends far beyond sports or artistic performance. A politician who is not, at some level, truly relaxed and sincere while giving a speech will come off as stiff and uncharismatic—a problem that plagued U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In the same way, a real love of reading, a genuine commitment to learning, and a deep curiosity about the world cannot be forced. Like that most elu­sive of modern goals, happiness, spontaneity seems to be as tricky to capture and keep as the hot hand in football. Consciously try to grab it and it’s gone.


November 18, 2014 · Hermeticism

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