Meditation

I’ve started meditating again. I say that not to “toot my own horn” or try and sound spiritual or anything, but, well, this is a blog, and I’m supposed to talk about myself. And, as my last post may show, I’ve been in a bit of a negative place lately, so this splash of Zen is good for me.

So, this afternoon, I sat. Before doing so, I read a bit out of the Tao Te Ching (which I recommend to everyone, it’s paradoxical but genius), the main Taoist text, I guess to get me in the right mindset. I just randomly opened it up, as I usually do, to wherever it takes me, and it took me to #48. After 15 or 20 minutes of sitting, I let my concentration ease and started thinking about this selection. The writer is referring to the concept of wu-wei, or doing non-doing. It’s fundamental in Taoism, the idea of letting things take their course. And I thought of a great metaphor to explain it, finally a way of making sense of a rather abstract concept.

Our lives are like a wooden staff out of balance. We stand, batting it from side to side to keep it from falling over to the floor, and before long become so accustomed to this game that we assume it to be the normal course of things, we think life is a constant fight against gravity, which always drags us down (and eventually will succeed). Some of us swing wildly from side to side, some stay low, others high, but we’re all doing the same thing, we’re all unbalanced.

But some among us discover a different way. Through a long, careful practice, say through meditation, prayer, “spiritual seeking”, or even through focused attention on our work, art, music, hobby, or sport, we may slowly bump and bat that staff towards full uprightness. There, balance is attained, the struggle is over. Life is not a battle against falling when we work WITH nature; now, that gravity which we so cursed before is now the very thing sustaining us. We need do no work, only allow nature to do it’s own, and not disturb it. This is wu-wei, this is non-doing.