Read time 2 minutes. Non-action is the seed out of which everything flowers. This stand alone article is the first in our Addition Through Subtraction series.
Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching reads:
To learn, one increases day by day;
To cultivate Tao, one reduces day by day.
Reduce and reduce and keep on reducing,
Till the state of non-action is reached.
This line points to a core paradox in Zen: how stillness, not striving, reveals real power.
Our culture praises action. It tells us to chase, to achieve, to own. “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Limited time offer. Buy now. And yet—Tao doesn’t strive. Tao doesn’t win by force. It wins by not contending.
So the question becomes: are we more interested in winning, or in discovering peace?
Non-action emulates tao
We each carry a duality: the ego and the Tao. The ego scrambles to protect itself. It’s driven by fear—of not having, not being, not knowing. Tao, by contrast, flows. It takes the low path, not the high horse. Like water, it yields—and yet it carves through stone.
Tao lacks nothing. Ego is always lacking.
So when we push to “get ahead,” we must ask: who’s running the show? The part of us that never feels safe—or the deeper presence that already is?
Letting go isn’t passivity. It’s trust. And it allows life to move in ways we couldn’t have planned.
Surrender, not strategy
This isn’t about rejecting nice things or productive effort. But if we make peace the priority, the rest will follow. Prioritizing peace doesn’t mean stagnation. It means stillness at the center—even as life moves around it.
When Tao is trusted, we don’t limit ourselves to what we can imagine. Tao is pure potentiality.
There’s more to explore in future posts. For now, just sit with this: peace doesn’t arrive through effort. It arrives when effort stops being in charge.
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How we go about encouraging the ego to give up its position of control is another story entirely. This article, The Art of Doing Nothing, offers some concrete practices.
Photo by Angie Fritz
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