May 2022 – David E. Storey

May 24, 2022June 17, 2022

Dao Du Jour II, Day 68: Followership

Chapter 68: Heaven’s Lead

“The best captain doesn’t rush in front.
The fiercest fights doesn’t bluster.
The big winner isn’t competing.
The best boss takes a low footing.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

Reality television is easy to dismiss as trash, and much of it surely is, but sometimes it appeals for good reasons: it transmits elemental truths about human nature. The show Undercover Boss is a case in point. In the show, company executives in large companies don the garb of their peasant workers and are forced to walk in their shoes for a day. In place of a number or a name on a spread sheet, they encounter a person. They take a “low footing.”

May 23, 2022June 17, 2022

Dao Du Jour II, Day 67: Three Treasures

Chapter 67: Three Treasures

“I have three treasures.
I keep and treasure them.
The first, mercy,
the second, moderation,
the third, modesty.
If you’re merciful you can be brave,
if you’re moderate you can be generous,
and if you don’t presume to lead,
you can lead the high and mighty.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

Mercy puts us in a moral, or even religious, frame of mind. Strange, then, that the word is etymologically related to our words for commerce: mercantile, merchant, merchandise. Or maybe not strange at all.

Economic transactions—whether the everyday exchange of money for goods and services, or the high-frequency securities trades coursing through fiber optic cables—are fueled by faith. Collective, largely tacit, agreement that money is valuable, that its current holders obtained it legally and justly in the past, and that debts incurred in the present can and will be paid in the future—all of these are articles of faith in the modern secular church of capitalism.

May 19, 2022June 17, 2022

Dao Du Jour II, Day 66: Of Tricksters and Trolls

Chapter 66: Lowdown

“Lakes and rivers are lords of the hundred valleys.
Why? Because they’ll go lower.
So they’re lords of the hundred valleys.
Just so, a wise soul,
Wanting to be above other people,
Talks to them from below,
And to guide them follows them.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

Michelle Obama was praised for exhorting us: “When they go low, we go high.”

While this kind of rhetoric feels good, it risks radiating the unique sort of moral self-righteousness that leads the left to electoral defeat.

People’s default settings leaving home and going out in public—at work, in a classroom, on a social media site, etc—are defense and projection of their priors. They are tightly gripping a double-edged sword called “us and them.”

May 18, 2022June 17, 2022

Dao Du Jour, Day II: Analogy is the Alchemy of Intellect and Imagination

Chapter 65: One Power

“Once upon a time
those who ruled according to the Way
didn’t use it to make people knowing
but to keep them unknowing.
People get hard to manage
when they know too much.
Whoever rules by intellect
is a curse upon the land.
Whoever rules by ignorance
is a blessing on it.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

In her commentary on this chapter, LeGuin observes: “This is a mystical statement about government—and in our minds those two realms are worlds apart.” World events are now conspiring to help us understand how they are bound.

May 17, 2022June 17, 2022

Dao Du Jour II, Day 64: Micro, Macro, Meso

Chapter 64: Mindful of Little Things

“It’s easy to keep hold of what hasn’t stirred,
Easy to plan what hasn’t occurred.
It’s easy to shatter delicate things,
Easy to scatter little things.
Do things before they happen.
Get them straight before they get mixed up.
The tree you can’t reach your arms around
Grew from a tiny seedling.
The nine-story tower rises from a leap of clay.
The ten-thousand-mile journey
Begins beneath your foot.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

The late great biologist and entomologist E.O. Wilson had a felicitous phrase to describe the billions of microorganisms beneath our feet: “the little things that run the world.” When we think about biodiversity loss and endangered species, we tend to picture the “charismatic megafauna” that populate our zoos and our nature documentaries. This is perfectly natural: we occupy the space between the microcosm and the macrocosm: the mesocosm. The human realm is the Middle Kingdom between what Pascal called the two infinities, the little window between the infinitesimal of the suboptical and the infinity of the superoptical. The meso is both our milieu and our metier.

May 4, 2022June 17, 2022

Dao Du Jour II, Day 63: The Easy and the Hard

Chapter 63: Consider Beginnings

“Study the hard while it’s easy.
Do big things while they’re small.
The hardest jobs in the world start out easy,
The great affairs of the world start small…
The wise soul, by treating the easy as hard,
Doesn’t find anything hard.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

I just completed my first sesshin, a week-long silent retreat in the Zen Buddhist tradition. It was not just hard, but a kind of hard so different from the normal round of challenges we all deal with on a regular basis. You sit in zazen, seated meditation, for roughly seven hours a day, starting at 4:30 am. From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that an animal programmed for sociality, movement, pursuit of desires, speech, and so on would choose to do such a thing flies in the face of reason. Realizing that the desire to give up, get up, and retreat from the retreat is a siren song seducing you away from your cushion requires Herculean restraint. Somehow, to simply sit is the most deceptively simply of things.