63
the thin green seedling
finds the crack in the concrete
and grows towards the light
Lesson # 63
Do only what is needed.
Start with the little things.
Look for the easiest way.
Meet adversity with kindness.
Nip problems in the bud.
Look on what others regard as a
difficulty, as just another
challenge, and begin to face it,
focusing only on what you can influence,
and you will not
have overwhelming problems.
From: 81 Lessons from the Tao Te Ching
Number 63 Centered
To practice non-action
is to act without excessive effort or anxiety
Staying in the present moment
we can savor whatever is right before us to do
instead of becoming overwhelmed
at the enormity of the problem
Magnify the small increase the few
We have to soften our focus to be aware of everything
and also sharpen our focus on the manageable problem in front of us.
And we have to do that all the while staying centered and compassionate
while everyone around us is going nuts
and blaming it on us
NUMBER SIXTY TWO
NUMBER SIXTY THREE
Be active, with the Activity of Inner Life.
Serve, with the Service of Inner Life.
Be fragrant, with the Fragrance of Inner Life.
The great shall be small,
The many shall be few, and
Evil shall be recompensed by goodness.
Mediate on difficult things till they become easy.
Do great deeds till they appear to be small.
To serve men in difficult things,
We must begin by easy things.
To serve men in great things,
We must begin by doing small things.
That is why the self-controlled man to the end of life
does not become great, and thus he can perfect his greatness.
The Master has little faith in a quickly made promise.
Many things are easy, many are also difficult.
The self-controlled man takes hold of difficulties.
To the end of life he solves difficulties in the Inner Life.
Isabella Mears, The Tao Teh King, A Tentative Translation from the Chinese, William McLellan, Glascow, 1916.
Number 63 (commentary) How are we going to solve these seemingly insolvable problems?
Lao Tsu gave us a good hint when he wrote in this chapter, “Magnify the small, increase the few.”
Ultimately, problems like the extinction of a species, rising ocean levels, global hunger, economic disparity and the breakdown of the social order cannot be solved on a micro level. We need to see how any one problem is interconnected with other problems in a web. We need to open wide our focus and “increase the few.” We have to understand that web in its complexity (a task which will involve intense interaction between the best minds and everything Artificial Intelligence can create to aid that work). We will need to follow the symptoms of individual problems upstream to discover common sources which create all these manifest problems. Desmond Tutu once said, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river, we need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.”
With that deeper understanding of the complexity of the problem and with potential solutions to try out, we will also need a way to constantly review each solution once it is implemented to see what happens as it comes to pass. Solutions inevitably create more problems. We need to examine what is not working in every tiny part of our solution before everything goes to hell. We need to “magnify the small.”
But as for you, keep your focus down to what you can do today to take one tiny step towards making the world a better place for us and for those who follow us.
Tangent and Tool #63, AI will not save us A question and a reflection: “Why can’t I just relax because AI will figure out how to get out of this mess?” Artificial Intelligence is pretty amazing. What it is capable of doing will soon make it an information processor superior to the human mind. Maybe that has already happened. And for those who think our primary function as a species is information processing, we’ve already lost that contest. But I assert our primary function might be solving problems and processing information is only a small part of that task. Imagination, creativity, intuition, synchronicity, lucky guessing, all of these are also part of problem solving. We will not be able to survive as a species on this planet without the aid of AI. The complexity of the problems we face and the chaotic interaction between them will require information processing beyond any individual’s capacity. But then we will need to interact with all that information in our eccentrically human way to discover the solutions that work.