I spend just about all my spare hours and minutes around beautiful furniture. I dive deeply into the creative work of (usually) nameless creators of tables, chairs, sideboards, plant stands and the like. I lovingly disassemble, repair and preserve. This process usually takes me to a quiet, infinite place – hard to describe or even imagine – but there nevertheless. In my other spare minutes, I read and write a little. In a few of those other spare minutes, I happened across a wee article on Wu Wei… (that is really bad humour, I know…)
Wu Wei means – in Chinese – non-doing or ‘doing nothing’. It sounds like a pleasant invitation to relax or worse, fall into laziness or apathy. Yet this concept is key to the noblest kind of action according to the philosophy of Daoism – and is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the central text of Daoism, the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’. This is the paradox of Wu Wei. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or ‘actionless action’. It means being at peace while engaged in the most frenetic tasks so that one can carry these out with maximum skill and efficiency. Something of the meaning of Wu Wei is captured when we talk of being ‘in the zone’ – at one with what we are doing, in a state of profound concentration and flow.
Wu Wei is closely connected to the Daoist reverence for the natural world, for it means striving to make our behaviour as spontaneous and inevitable as certain natural processes, and to ensure that we are swimming with rather than against currents. We are to be like the bamboo that bends in the wind or the plant that adjusts itself to the shape of a tree. Wu Wei involves letting go of ideals that we may otherwise try to force too violently onto things; it invites us instead to respond to the true demands of situations, which tend only to be noticed when we put our own ego-driven plans aside. What can follow is a loss of self-consciousness, a new unity between the self and its environment, which releases an energy that is normally held back by an overly aggressive, willful style of thinking.
But none of this means we won’t be able to change or affect things if we strive for Wu Wei. The Dao De Jing points out that we should be like water, which is ‘submissive and weak’ and ‘yet which can’t be surpassed for attacking what is hard and strong’. Through gentle persistence and a compliance with the specific shape of a problem, an obstacle can be worked round and gradually eroded.
In China’s Tang dynasty, many poets likened Wu Wei to the best aspects of being drunk. It wasn’t alcoholism they were promoting, but the decline in rigidity and anxiety that sometimes comes with being a little drunk, and which can help us to accomplish certain tasks. One poet compared someone inspired by Wu Wei to a drunk man who falls uninjured from a moving cart – such is their spiritual momentum that they are unaffected by accidents and misfortunes that might break those of a more controlled and controlling mindset.
A good life, it is said, could not be attained by Wu Wei alone – but this Daoist concept captures a distinctive wisdom we may at times be in desperate need of, when we are in danger of damaging ourselves through an overly stern and unyielding adherence to ideas which simply cannot fit the demands of the world as it is. And yet taking a few precious minutes to dip into the silence and stillness while devoting ones full attention to the creative work of another… well that is my Wu Wei…
