When the world feels like it’s burning and you feel powerless to stop it, what can one person possibly do?
When I turn my attention to what is happening in Ukraine right now, I, like many of us, feel overwhelmed, sorrowful, and helpless. A good friend of mine with extended family in Kiev and Odessa said to me yesterday that her prevailing feeling is “powerless”. While of course we can post our views on social media, check in with friends and family who are affected by the conflict, and perhaps even march in a protest, these actions feel insufficient in the face of such senseless aggression, violence, and destruction. We are all waiting to see what action elected politicians will take, at a time when governments seem gridlocked and particularly ineffective. We are all tense about what this war foreshadows.
So what can we do? For the past few days, I’ve been remembering a nature retreat I participated in last year, on the topic of climate change. We were tasked with building sculptures that represented the prevailing mood in our lives, using whatever we could find in nature. One woman built this massive structure and then demolished it. Next to it, she created a new, smaller structure, built of fruits and flowers. As she explained it, the massive structure represented the world burning, and the smaller structure represented what was being re-born from the fire. She said that she no longer had the energy to try and prevent the world from burning, but she could be part of the effort to already begin building something new and beautiful.
When it comes to building something new and beautiful, I turn to the Tao Te Ching (specifically, the translation by Stephen Mitchell). These 81 verses by Lao-tzu are an invitation to an alternative way of living which is just as relevant now as when it was written more than 2,500 years ago. In it, he calls for wei wu wei, ‘doing not-doing’, the idea of reducing efforting and embracing softness and fluidity. Many of the verses are dedicated to the topics of leadership and governance, with paradoxical ideas such as yielding in the face of evil (‘give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself’). However, after reading it and beginning to embrace its practices over the past five years, I can feel a deep shift in how I orient to and experience the world. Reading the Tao Te Ching this week has been like drinking cool water on a scorching hot day, and I hope to bring many verses to you over the coming months. For now, Verse 67 particularly speaks to me as a contribution we can all make as a counterbalance to all the evil that exists in the world – in Ukraine and elsewhere. If you do nothing else, perhaps you can join me in practicing simplicity, patience, and compassion.
