Ah, this old beauty. What is Wu Wei in Tao? One moment while I bite into my sandwich…
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched ants. You know, they kind of go about doing their stuff. Often, when I’m sat in the grass not doing much, I see them skittering around this way and that. One will crawl onto my knee while another turns around and thinks better of it. A dried leaf is much more interesting and far less dangerous.
Now you see the thing is, they aren’t creatures of very big brains. I’ve never seen one attempt the Rubik’s Cube, or offer to make me a cup of herbal tea. And I can’t say that they have this big ego thing going on. They have a Queen who they serve, they have a society, and they are organised into different roles. I don’t see one wanting to wear a blue sweater one day to be different, while another is worrying about its weight.
They just are.
Now Wu Wei is something that mankind has created into a concept. This probably happened years before social media when people had nothing to do but wonder how the cows were keeping. Wu (without) Wei (doing)…
ah, but Wei also means being.
Without doing and without being.
How can something not be and also not do? Even this cactus is being.
But not doing very much. Just enjoying the sunlight and feeling rather chipper.
If we forget all the bothersome concepts for a moment and think about ants… they get stuff done. They’re quite successful. Sometimes, they are too successful and want to wander across my kitchen floor heading to the bread bin.
Do ants have any concepts going on here? They go in and out of stuff, turn left, and turn right. What’s doing all that? What makes the decision to go left and not right? How do they know if they are being useful or not? Does the Queen give them key performance indicators?
They don’t think like us do they? Turning left and right isn’t something we give much attention to. We’re more interested in whether we got a new subscriber this morning, or does our new haircut make us look younger, sexier, or whatnot.
While ants are gathering bits from the garden and taking them back to their nest for a long pause and some thoughtful silence, we tend to be on the go all the time. 5am clubs. YouTube content creators. Slouch on the sofa chomping on popcorn while watching Star Trek.
We have an idea of who we are. You know who you are, and how I am me, and we are not the same are we, or are we? You have your ideas about you and I have mine. And we tend to do the kind of things that reinforce our sense of who we are, our sense of self.
“I wouldn’t be seen dead doing that.”
or
“I really need a new car with a better infotainment system, and quilted leather seats so I don’t sweat so much at McDonald’s drive-through”.
When our sense of self doesn’t like what is currently happening, or how things are right now, there is resistance. The universe has presented you with “your” life and you jolly well aren’t accepting it. You want more. You want abundance and lots of it.
And when life isn’t dishing up the main course we want, and we feel resistance to it and want to do something better for “ourselves” then we overlook Wu Wei.
Wu Wei is life jiggling around the universe and sending some of its energetic vibes your way. Its creative energy lies within us and expresses itself in whatever way it is doing so. And only when we aren’t satisfied with that and try to poke our finger into the works to make something more to our liking, do we step off the path of Wu Wei.
Ants don’t do this.
It doesn’t mean that their lives are any better.
I might have sat on one while getting down to flower level.
They don’t have a sense of self that thinks something should be different than how it is.
They probably don’t even think about how it is.
And them being creatures of small brains and we being creatures of big brains, well, you’d think that we’d be better at getting stuff done. But look at all the art we have created! Look at the big cities and the cars rushing around, and the great jobs we’ve got, and the big houses, and going to watch football.
The life we made is so exciting! Doing, doing, doing. Busy, busy, busy. Bills, bills, bills.
And ants are boring.
Cows are boring.
Cows… I wonder how they are keeping?
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