Laozi

Their big question

Is it better to push, or to let things happen?

Laozi’s idea is easy to state and hard to live: the soft beats the hard, and the person who stops shoving usually gets further.

Water is his example. Push it and it moves aside. Hold it and it runs through your fingers. And yet a river carves a canyon. Nothing is weaker, and nothing wears down stone. So he asked why we spend our lives being hard — insisting, arguing, forcing — when the soft thing wins in the end anyway.

He applied this to people, including people in charge. The best ruler, he wrote, is barely noticed: the work gets done, the seasons turn, and when it is over the people say they did it themselves. He called it wu wei, which is usually translated as not-doing, though a closer idea is not forcing.

There is an obvious objection, which is that some things do need pushing. A tooth needs brushing. A wrong needs answering. Laozi’s reply is not that you should do nothing, it is that effort spent fighting the shape of a problem is wasted, and that acting with the grain rather than against it is not laziness but skill. You can decide for yourself whether that is wisdom or an excuse.

“The softest thing in the world overruns the hardest.”

From the Dao De Jing. Water is his example: it yields to everything and wears down rock.

Three things worth knowing

• Almost nothing is known about him as a person. Even his dates are guesswork across two centuries, and some scholars doubt he was one man.
• The book credited to him, the Dao De Jing, is about five thousand characters long and has been translated more often than almost any book except the Bible.
• He was said to have left China on a water buffalo after deciding people would not listen — which is itself an argument about effort.

Try it — think like Laozi

Pick something you are pushing hard at — a puzzle, a person, a habit. Try the opposite for one day: stop pushing and see what happens on its own. Write down which result surprised you.

Zhang Lu-Laozi Riding an Ox (cropped) — Zhang Lu. Source on Wikimedia Commons.