The Tao of Work
What do you do when you have work to do, yet your heart isn’t in it? How about when you’ve scheduled creative time for yourself, and the moment arrives but you’re feeling the exact opposite of creative - the inspiration is nowhere to be found?
The tides of our lives are indeed unpredictable. Moment to moment, who we are tends to ebb and flow like waves in the ocean. Sometimes we can catch a creative wave and it seems effortless to ride it. Other times, it’s a struggle to paddle out and build up the momentum necessary to ride the wave.
Everything that we experience, everything that happens in our lives, can be related to an oscillation. What is an oscillation? It is something dynamic, not static. It is something that moves from one end to the other. Without getting too esoteric, it is vibration.
Inspiration, flow-state, “getting in the zone”, our genius, or going back a few centuries, our daemon, can be difficult to pin down or summon up, it seems to come of it’s own accord. This brings me to the Taoist concept of wu-wei.
Wu-wei in essence means “not forcing”, going with the way of things, the natural tides that life wants to carry you on. As a philosophy, it’s much easier to understand than it is to put into practice because, especially in the modern world, we have deadlines. We have time blocks. We have commitments. We have responsibilities that we have agreed to, and if we want to be respectful and respectable, professional human beings, we can’t very well back out on our commitments.
There are tides within tides within tides…
I subscribe to Jocko Willinck’s idea of “extreme ownership”. I do what I say I’m going to do, when I say I’m going to do it. And if I make a mistake or fall short, I take full, unabashed responsibility and do everything I can to make it right. By and by, you learn to remedy this by just doing what you said you would do in the first place.
This washes away the option that you can back out of it. So how does the idea that life has a current, an ideal flow for your moment-to-moment existence fall in line with sticking to your schedule, following through with your commitments?
Some days, I simply don’t want to work – I’d rather take the day off and venture out into some misty mountain top somewhere, enjoy a joint with a friend, or go swim in the river and forget all about my responsibilities.
But of course, I don’t do that. I’ve committed to an ideal that is greater than myself, as I’m sure all of you out there reading this have. Perhaps you have a high-powered career or you run an organization in which many other people are depending on you. Perhaps you have a family, and that carries it’s own inherent responsibilities. We cannot (and should not) simply forego our responsibilities simply because we feel life has other plans for us in that moment.
Nobody likes a flake.
The Taoists teach that life is always in flux – a beautifully orchestrated oscillation between two opposite principles. Light-dark. Work-play. Sorrow-joy. Rest-activity. We are constantly and endlessly dancing between the two.
One thing is for certain, life is not stationary. It is infinitely moving, flowing, changing, transforming. We cannot and should not be so rigid, so stuck in our ways, that we put our health or the experience of others in jeopardy.
In our fast-paced, schedule driven, high-rev society, we are often fed the idea that more is better, that success is found by pushing through at all costs, that we can only achieve greatness if we sacrifice all in the name of our ideal.
Not withholding the truth that we are all unique, we are all different, and we all have different tendencies and capacities, there is another truth that stands alongside – we are all SO much more capable than we think we are.
Sometimes, the natural flow or way of things IS to push through the resistance that is trying to stop you. I’m a big fan of Stephen Pressfield and his book The War of Art, in which he describes resistance as a force not to conflict with, but to be befriended. You can turn your resistance into a rudder, a guiding force in your life if you learn to work with it, not against it.
How does one know if pushing through the resistance is indeed the natural flow that life wants to take you on? How can we decide to stick to our plan, to our trajectory that we’ve set for ourselves, against all odds and defiance?
I don’t have the answer for you. It is something that must be learned by trial and error. And even when you think you have got it down, life has a way of testing your resolve. This idea carries nuance within nuance - each one of us, each one of our lives is entirely and independently unique.
There is no experience or moment in your life that anyone else can experience in exactly the same way. There is no place in the universe that is exactly, 100% like any other place. Therefore, each moment is a unique moment. Each attraction and repellence is a portrayal of vibration.
The idea of “not-forcing” things can be both a liberation and a limitation; until you learn to transcend it’s mundane meaning and integrate the principle into your life, it can be difficult to grasp.
We all have a multitude of different voices inside our heads competing for attention at any given moment. The voice you decide to listen to is the one that carries you to the next moment, to your desires, to your ideals.
The moment you decide YOU are going to be the one who leads your life is the moment you decide whether or not you will resist life, or you will flow with it.
This doesn’t mean all of your problems will magically wash away, and that everything will suddenly be hunky-dory. Far from it, in fact. The main difference is that you no longer struggle with life, you dance with it. You no longer resist life’s currents, you ride them. You no longer try to get out of things, or bail out on things, you integrate them into who you are.
The truth is, sometimes you are more capable of creative work. Sometimes you are more attuned to mundanity or repetitive tasks. Sometimes you must work, and sometimes you must rest. You are always the one in the drivers seat, yet sometimes you listen to the voice that takes you away from your objective. Hopefully this becomes a teacher, an opportunity to learn.
If you’ve set out to do something, and the time arrives for you to do it, yet you find yourself resisting, try and do it anyway. If after a 4th or 5th try, you don’t produce the results you’re seeking, this may be life’s way of telling you to step away for a while. Not step away completely, but just for a while. Maybe, just maybe, life is calling for a pause.
If you watch animals in their natural environment for any given amount of time, you will notice that animals naturally and regularly PAUSE. Do we have time in our busy modern high-octane lives to simply pause???
It sounds insane to productivity junkies, but if you find yourself not knowing what to do or having a hard time building momentum, perhaps a pause is needed. Perhaps it’s time to shift gears into something completely different. Perhaps life is producing a wave, you’re just caught in the wrong whirlpool.
The other day, no matter what I did, I simply could not get the work done I needed to do. I kept pushing, I kept trying, I kept giving it all of my effort and to no avail, nothing was produced. I started to get nervous, because other people are relying on me and paying for my productive time. This really set me going to try and produce meaningful work. Then I remembered, if I’m working and nothing is getting produced, is my time really valuable at all anyways?
I took a pause, went for a walk, and then I simply sat down and did absolutely nothing for 15 minutes. When I got up, I found myself filled with inspiration, consumed by creative energy – something had opened up inside of me and now all of the sudden I was on a roll!
I share all of this with you because I find it enjoyable to explore. I obviously don’t have all the answers (nobody does). If someone tells you they have it all figured out, move in the other direction. They are only fooling themselves.
I simply find this line of thinking to be useful in any endeavor – be it creative, work related, investment-wise, fitness minded, relational, the Taoists were on to something that to me seems like a universal truth. The idea that nothing is solid, nothing is set in stone, everything is ever changing, and somehow eternally changeless… Those are the ideas that get me going.
In order to be productive, we must have periods of stillness, of unproductivity, or open space. In order for us to enjoy the not-doing, we must have periods where we do a whole lot. We are constantly dancing between the two. And we all have different temperaments, different conditionings, different ways of being. Some people are naturally geared to be intense “do-ers” and some are naturally more passive. It’s up to us to decide what kind of a person we want to be. Our idea of who we are is also always changing.
In life’s endless spectrums, where do you fall naturally? Where do you want to move your position to on the spectrum? And where do we need to grow, to expand, to stretch into, because that is what life is calling of us?
I hope this wasn’t too out there for you – it was fun to write and I trust that it will lend some insight into my psyche. If this kind of discussion is useful for you, leave me a comment and let’s explore it further. If it wasn’t, let me know why! Thank you for reading, and may you all continue to follow the tides that life puts in your path.
-Kristian Hval