peace

Don’t Forget Your Centre

Sometimes it’s only when you lean back in the water and be still that you realise how hard you’ve been thrashing your arms and legs about to stay afloat.

I’ve just started a new semester of teaching at university, and have been immersed in so many projects over the last few months. It’s an exciting time for me, but often I forget to invest my energy in a way that grounds and centres me, and instead I end up scattered and exhausted. We all need things that bring stability to the mind and body.

This evening, after a busy day at work, I took twenty minutes out to practice calligraphy. And now I feel calm, focused, and ready to keep walking forwards.

I’m working my way, chapter-by-chapter, through the Tao Te Ching:

Tao Te Ching 29: Not Doing

filling in a form: more peace than hours of meditation

I have always been a yang person. By that I mean I’m never happy with any sort of limitation; I always want to push higher, go further, and create more, and I always seek the bright, well-illuminated sides of life.

But life that is all yang is without balance.

Taoist theory states that as soon as the sun reaches its brightest in our sky, it starts to decline, and we head toward darkness. The opposite is true in the still of night with the moon. It’s easy to see the balance in nature. It’s not always so easy to see it in the lives of productive, passionate dream-chasers. David wrote a piece that is closely related to this over at almost bohemian.

I thrive on creating new things. My imagination kicks in; the new project has started; I’m happy. But when the newness has settled down, I often get tired of it and want to start something else. This explains the huge amount of hobbies I’ve tried, but the very small number I’ve stuck with for more than a year or two. I’m just not very good at seeing things through.

There has been one thing on my to-do list for about two years. Two years. That’s how bad I am at finishing stuff. It was pretty simple: find-out how I can pay into the UK social security system, fill in the forms, and send the payments, so that when I retire in Thailand (which is my dream), I’ll have a small but usable pension. I’ve tackled this to-do item sporadically and half-heartedly. It’s the kind of job you can postpone almost indefinitely. Which I have.

But you know, I woke up this morning (having settled the pension issue) feeling a wide sense of peace. In the path to wholeness and peace, sometimes you have to do intense inner work, but sometimes you just need to make sure your debts and bills are paid. Lift the practical burdens from your mind—even if they are ridiculous demands made by the crazy economic systems we live in—and find rest.