Chapter 15
“Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?”
~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.
From the moment we wake up, the mud starts to seep in—meetings, appointments, deadlines, dogs to walk, groceries to buy, meals to cook, commutes to bear. The cocoon of the covers beckons.
But these things are not the true mud. The true mud is how our minds relate to them. As stoic philosopher Epictetus put it, “It is not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinions of things.” If we don’t find a way to let our mud settle, we are going to try and offload it onto others throughout the day—consciously or unconsciously, crudely or subtly. If we don’t clean our minds up, they’re going to pollute, and that, in turn, will lead others to pollute. All told, we’ll just wake up tomorrow with more mud on our minds.
The call of the covers, of course, is a siren song. They lead us not to escape from the mud, but to wallow in it, precisely because the mud is not in the world outside of them, but in our own minds. Marcus Aurelius, another stoic thinker, had a considered view of the matter:
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”
The opposite mistake of wallowing in the mud is the wish to rid the world of it. As Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh likes to say, “No mud, no lotus.” Rather than pushing the mud away, we must allow it to settle, for it is ultimately the soil that nurtures and reveals the flowers we seek.
And once the mud has settled, we can finally play in it.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”