Do you want to improve the world?

I don't think it can be done.
—Chapter 29, Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu, as translated by Stephen Mitchell

Is it nihilistic? Does it give us an out? I certainly felt some measure of relief when I read this stanza—Oh thank God, there is nothing I can actually do—and despair—Oh God, there is nothing I can actually do. Funny what removing that one word, thank, does.

I’ve been reading poetry this month, a practice I had given up in college at the tail end of my English major. The Tao Te Ching was required for the restorative yoga module I wrote about last month, and a copy of Sinners Welcome By Mary Karr beckoned to me at the Strand after overhearing—and perhaps embarrassingly, interrupting—a college boy waxing poetic (no pun intended) about David Fucking Wallace. All I want to read about these days, apparently, is about how much I’ve fucked up and how I’m forgiven anyway. Isn’t that, at the end of the day, all we can ask for?

In Mitchell’s notes on that particular stanza, he quotes Ramana Maharshi:

Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.

It is miles easier to change ourselves than trying to change others, because the latter is impossible. We can do the very best we can with what we have, but anything outside of that is out of our control.

His note on It can’t be improved:

This is the Sabbath mind, as in the first chapter of Genesis: when God, from a state of perfect repose, looks at the world and says, “Behold, it is very good.” Actually, this “it can't be improved” is the greatest possible improvement.

Look at the state our environment is in! We fucked up! How do we get rid of a virus? Fever. Climate change is the Gaia’s way of purging a virus. Nature takes its course.

Of course, there is certainly a free-market bent to be taken from this (Chapter 57: “The more subsidies you have,/the less self-reliant people will be.”) but I do find this oddly hopeful—these things work under the assumption that everyone is centered in the Tao (or God, Love, Higher Self, whatever name you prefer to give your deity). It assumes the best of people instead of the worst. It asks us to trust and forgive each other, not because we deserve it, but because in giving those things unto others, we also give trust and forgiveness to ourselves (the prayer of St. Francis: For it is in giving that we receive./It is in pardoning that we are pardoned).

This dive into faith—others’ and my own—that I’ve been plunging into over the past couple of months has been driven primarily by our political climate and this feeling of teetering on the edge of revolution. In the same way that I’m a cradle Catholic, I am in many ways a cradle leftist-social-justice-warrior-Democrat. This is counterintuitive to many, particularly people who grew up in and around the Religious Right (I am also a part of this subset). What I hear frequently is the idea that the Democratic party is about regulation, regulation, and regulation, but what has resonated with me and my politic from these spiritual texts are these movements of doing nothing in the sense of undoing. Undoing the damage done, acts of restoration and reparation. In a sense, I think that’s what I’ve been trying to write about all along here: a returning to the center. Will you join me?

All my love,
Kara

Missed a letter? Catch up here.
If you enjoyed this, forward it to someone who might enjoy it too?