Trusting Your Path
Image Courtesy of Luke Schroeder
“We-wei is the Taoist principle of trust. The trust of wu-wei threatens any governmental, social, religious, and cultural landscape. We align with our innate trust when we are not forcing and instead allow life to take place. This capacity to align with your innate trust brings you back in harmony with the entire cosmos.”
-Tao Te Ching, Translated by Jason Gregory
You know that feeling when you really want something to go perfectly as planned but it ends up having its own agenda? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.
As someone who has experienced my fair share of this feeling, I know how uncomfortable it can feel. But at the end of the day, it's important to remember that some things, no matter how hard we try to paint it to look like a chicken, still might quack like a duck.
And that's okay.
Society can be very demanding. It imprints expectations shaped by social norms into everything we know about the world and who we are within it. Even as small children we are asked what we want to be when we grow up. That's the largest of the nesting dolls.
The nesting dolls represent the cookie cutter life that we have to get just right for success.
As we grow older, we might feel the nesting dolls getting smaller, with less room for error, deviation, and imagination. For example, what career you pick is shaped by many other factors like their salary, their availability, and their status. If you hesitate or are not proactive even from a young age we are taught that we run the risk of being left behind. This sounds stressful, right?
The government and social constructs have over generalized our lives and put imaginary labels and timelines on all kinds of things. When we miss one of the steps on the meticulous agenda, we usually feel restless, down, embarrassed, or anxious about our future.
Wu-wei helps us regain our inner peace as we move through life because it sets aside the rigorous agenda that society has laid out for us and instead appreciates the present and welcomes change.
This can be threatening for governmental and societal constructs because it's more difficult to label, influence, and harness power from. While governments struggle to preserve their influence when this principle is applied, individuals gain more influence, confidence, inner peace, and appreciation for the present.
When we think about wu-wei and business, the first thing is to remember not to sacrifice your inner peace for your job. Your inner peace and job should complement each other. By prioritizing your inner peace, you stress less and also hold more tightly onto your individuality and voice. These will help protect your inner wu-wei.
And if you are a business owner, some ways you can help promote wu-wei in your workplace are by cultivating autonomy, reducing micromanagement, and embracing adaptability. By doing this, your employees will feel more at ease with finding ways to work that complement their individual strengths, having change be seen as an asset rather than a hindrance, and by lightening the mood of the workplace with new creative and refreshing ideas.
By Arabella Davis