You are trying to fall asleep.
The harder you try, the more awake you become. You arrange the pillow. You count backward. You tell yourself to relax.
The trying is what is keeping you up.
You already know this. Everyone knows this.
What you have not noticed is that the same structure runs through almost everything else you do.
You try to be calm and become tense. You try to be funny and become stiff. You try to fall in love and the falling stops.
The trying replaces the thing.
There is an old Chinese phrase for what you are missing.
Wu wei. It translates as non-doing, or effortless action, though both translations are slightly wrong.
It does not mean doing nothing. It means doing without the one who is doing.
The cook in the Zhuangzi cuts up an ox for nineteen years and never dulls his blade.
He says his knife finds the spaces in the joints. He is not cutting. The cutting is happening.
This sounds mystical until you remember what it is like to ride a bicycle.
You did not learn to ride by trying. You learned by getting on the bicycle and falling off it for a week.
Then one afternoon you were riding, and you could not say what you had done differently.
The trying had stopped.
What was left was the riding.
Wu wei is what is left when the trying stops.
It is not a special state. It is what has been there underneath every action you ever performed well.
Notice the actions in your life that go best.
The conversation where you forgot to manage your face. The work that pulled you in and did itself. The walk where your legs were doing the walking without your supervision.
None of these involved a manager.
The manager is what you have been adding to everything else.
Laozi wrote:
Do nothing, and nothing is left undone.
This is not a riddle. It is a description.
When you stop adding the doer, the doing happens.
The doing was already happening. The doer was the friction.
You can feel this right now.
Your heart is beating. You are not beating it. Your breath is moving. You are not moving it.
The most important things in your body are wu wei already.
Imagine if your heart needed your supervision.
You would die in an hour.
So why do you supervise everything else.
The supervisor was an answer to a problem that did not exist.
You assumed nothing would happen if no one was in charge. So you put yourself in charge. And things kept happening, and you took the credit for them, and the loop closed.
You now believe you are necessary.
You are not necessary.
The breath does not need you. The heart does not need you. The thought arising right now did not need you to produce it.
What is left for you to do.
Nothing.
What is left is for you to stop doing what was already being done.
This is the hardest sentence in the project so far.
The mind reads it and immediately starts a new project. I will stop doing. I will practice non-doing. I will become the kind of person who has mastered wu wei.
The doer is back. The doing has been resumed.
There is no version of trying to stop trying that works.
The trying is the problem.
So what.
So nothing. So go about your day.
The point of wu wei is not that you achieve it. The point is that you notice how often it is already happening, and you stop interfering with it.
The cook does not think about the spaces in the ox.
If he thought about them, the blade would catch.
He has spent nineteen years not thinking about them, and the knife stays sharp.
You have spent your whole life thinking about the spaces.
The kindness you offered without rehearsing it. The sentence that came out exactly right before you had time to draft it. The hand that caught the falling glass before your mind named the glass.
These were not your accomplishments. They were what happened when you got out of the way.
Get out of the way more often.
Not as a practice. As a noticing of when you were already out of the way and the action was already complete.
The mind will want a method.
There is no method. A method would be more doing.
There is only this. The recognition, repeated whenever you remember, that the doing is already happening, and the doer was the small drag you were adding to it.
You stand up from the chair. The standing is not yours. You walk to the kitchen. The walking is not yours. You drink the water. The drinking is not yours.
A whole life has been lived this way already. You just kept claiming it.
Stop claiming it.
The life continues.
Sources: Laozi, Tao Te Ching, ch. 48, traditional date 6th century BCE. Zhuangzi, "Cook Ting Cuts Up an Ox," ch. 3, ~4th century BCE.