Tao oats for breakfast
Antidotes to the contemporary malaise: do nothing, and ambitiously so. If you need or want to do something, fine. But in terms of imposed agendas and habitual relationships, just hold your horses for a while.
Allow yourself to clearly formulate just how drained these actions and people actually make you feel. Why on earth do you allow it? If it’s a matter of extreme importance, urgency or sustenance, by all means accept. But never uncritically.
Most of our time is not spent in urgencies or extreme situations. The run of the mill, the everyday, the trivial regularities… These are the relevant barricades of your existential leakage counterforce.
Dare to say NO to what’s expected of you. You don’t have to justify anything to anyone. It feels great to reclaim your time and space, and it’s much easier than you think. Remember Nancy Reagan? “Just say NO!”
Please also note what the reactions are to your new attitude. These will be indicative of who or what constitute the greatest energy thieves of your life. If someone turns out to be irrationally and reactively unbearable you should applaud yourself: you have just exposed a psychic vampire!
Most people will salute your attempts at increased independence, in the hope that you will return the courtesy some day (when they reach your level of insight). But those who do not, or who even mock your attempts, reveal their epiphytic/parasitic perversion. You should be honoured; to some extent they cannot fully function without clinging to you. But if they give nothing back, you have to cut those ties with a very sharp object.
And then get back to doing nothing. Let the world know you’re enjoying it, if that’s genuinely relevant to you. If not, do nothing in the full-blown glory of your inner sanctum privacy. It’s the ultimate heretical act, and the ultimate luxury, in a devastated world filled with supreme stress, fickle fragmentation and parasitic perverts indulging in their own delirious death drives.
“Being centred, you will be calm.
Being calm, you will be enlightened.
Being enlightened, you will be empty.
Being empty, you will be in actionless action,
But with actionless action, nothing remains undone.”
(The Book of Chuang Tzu)
