The Art of Not Forcing

Laozi and Zhuangzi for Tired Hearts

Introduction

This book is for people who try very hard. Perhaps you are the one who stays late to finish what others have left undone. Perhaps you answer messages before you have even got out of bed. Perhaps you are raising children, caring for a parent and working at a job, and you cannot remember the last time you sat down without a list running in your head. Perhaps you are a student who studies until midnight, an athlete who trains through pain or someone who simply believes that if things are not going well, the answer must be to push harder.

Effort is a good thing. Much of what is valuable in human life comes from people who cared enough to work hard. But effort can also turn against us. When we push without rest, grip without letting go and force things that will not move, we become exhausted, tense and brittle. Our work often becomes worse, not better. Our relationships suffer. And we lose sight of why we were trying so hard in the first place.

More than two thousand years ago, two remarkable books offered a different way of looking at effort. The first is the Daodejing, a short book of poems traditionally said to have been written by a wise man called Laozi. The second is the Zhuangzi, a collection of stories, jokes and reflections named after a thinker called Zhuangzi. Both books speak of the Way, the natural way in which things happen and flow, and of the art of not forcing: acting in harmony with how things are, rather than straining against them.

These books have been read for centuries as philosophy, as poetry and as practical wisdom for daily life. They are full of images from nature: water that wears down stone, trees that bend in the wind, a cook whose knife never grows dull because he follows the natural lines of the meat. They do not tell us to stop trying. They tell us that there is a way of trying that does not exhaust us, and that sometimes the wisest effort is to stop, to rest or to let go.

How to Use This Book

There are fifteen chapters. Each begins with a scene from the life of someone who is trying too hard. Then it explains an idea from the Daodejing or the Zhuangzi in plain words. The old texts have been translated in many different ways, and their language is often mysterious, so all passages in this book are given in my own simple paraphrase, together with the chapter number, so that you can find them in any translation. After that come examples from many kinds of lives, practical steps, a short section on a common misunderstanding, a short exercise and a summary.

You do not need to read quickly. In fact, it may be better if you do not. The old books themselves are meant to be read slowly, a little at a time, with pauses for thought. You might read one chapter a week, or one section a day. You can read in order, or open the book at the chapter that speaks to you today. If a chapter does not suit you, leave it and come back later.

Many of the exercises are very simple: a pause, a walk, a few lines in a notebook, a small change in the way you approach a task. They are not meant to be one more thing to do perfectly. If an exercise starts to feel like a burden, let it go. That, too, is part of the art of not forcing.

A Note on Care

Tiredness is part of life, but some exhaustion is more than ordinary tiredness. If you have felt exhausted for a long time, if rest no longer helps, if you are struggling to sleep or eat, or if your mood is very low, please talk to a doctor or another qualified professional. Doing so is not a sign of weakness. It is a sensible way of caring for yourself.

If you ever feel that you might hurt yourself, or if you are in danger, please do not wait. Contact a helpline or a medical facility right away, and in immediate danger call your local emergency number.

With that said, let us begin gently, with an image from the Daodejing: a bowl filled to the very brim.

Chapter 1: When Trying Hard Becomes Too Hard

A Woman Who Never Sits Down

Paloma is forty-one. She is the deputy head of a primary school, the mother of two children aged nine and twelve and the person in her family whom everyone calls when something needs to be organized. She wakes at half past five, answers emails before breakfast, makes lunches, drives the children to their schools, arrives at work before the other teachers and leaves after most of them. In the evenings, she helps with homework, cooks, prepares the next day's lessons and, when the children are asleep, answers more emails.

Paloma is very good at what she does. Her school runs smoothly. Her children are cared for. Her colleagues admire her energy. When people ask how she manages everything, she laughs and says, "I just keep going." She has always believed that if something is not working, the answer is to try harder. That belief has carried her through her studies, her early career and the arrival of her children.

Lately, though, something has changed. Paloma is tired in a way that sleep does not fix. She forgets things, which she never used to do. She snaps at her children over small things and then feels guilty. At work, she has started to feel a strange distance from the job she once loved, as if she were watching herself from outside. Last week, she sat in her car in the school car park for ten minutes before she could make herself go in. She did not know why. She simply could not move.

Her first response was the one she always used. She decided to try harder. She made a new, more detailed schedule. She set her alarm half an hour earlier. She told herself to stop being weak. But the harder she pushed, the worse she felt. It was like trying to run faster in deep sand. Every effort seemed to sink her further.

Many people know a version of Paloma's experience. We have been taught that effort is the answer to every difficulty, and often it is. But there comes a point where effort itself becomes the problem. Two ancient books, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, have a great deal to say about this point, and about another way of living and working.

Two Old Books About the Way

The Daodejing is a short book of about five thousand characters, arranged in its usual form into eighty-one brief chapters, many of them written like poems. Tradition says that it was written by a man called Laozi, whose name simply means something like "the old master". According to an old story, first written down by a historian several centuries later, Laozi was a keeper of records at an ancient royal court. When he decided to leave and travel west, a guard at the border pass asked him to write down his wisdom before he went. Laozi wrote the book and then disappeared. This story is best read as legend.

Very little is known for certain about Laozi, and many scholars think that the Daodejing grew over time, with contributions from more than one person. What matters for us is the book itself. Its central idea is the Dao, which can be translated as "the Way". The Way is not a god or a rule. It is the natural way in which things happen: the way water flows downhill, seasons change, seeds grow and living things rise and rest. The book suggests that human beings live best when they move in harmony with this natural way, rather than straining against it.

The Zhuangzi is a longer book, named after a thinker called Zhuang Zhou, who probably lived around the fourth century before the common era. In its usual form it has thirty-three chapters. The first seven, called the inner chapters, are usually thought to be closest to Zhuangzi himself, while many scholars think that most of the other chapters were written by later followers. Where the Daodejing is brief and mysterious, the Zhuangzi is playful and full of stories: talking trees, wise cooks, frogs in wells, butterflies and a giant bird that rises high on the wind toward the southern sea. It shares the Daodejing's love of the natural Way, but it adds humour, imagination and a deep suspicion of anyone who takes life too seriously.

These two books are often read together, and together they have been studied for many centuries as philosophy, as literature and as practical guides to living. In this book, we will read them as practical wisdom for one particular kind of person: someone who tries too hard. Both books have a great deal to say to such a person, and much of it is surprisingly gentle.

One word of honesty about the texts. Because they are very old, written in a style that is often unclear and translated in many different ways, nobody can claim to know exactly what every line means. When this book describes a passage, it gives one plain reading of it, in my own words, with the chapter number. Other readers may understand the same passage differently. That is part of the beauty of these books. They invite each reader to find their own meaning.

The Bowl Filled to the Brim

In chapter 9 of the Daodejing, there is a short passage that seems almost written for Paloma. In my own plain words: to hold a bowl and keep filling it is not as good as stopping in time. If you keep sharpening a blade, its edge will not last. If you fill a hall with gold and jade, you cannot guard it. If you are proud of your wealth and position, you invite your own downfall. When the work is done, step back. This is the way of heaven (Daodejing, chapter 9).

Think about the image of the bowl. If you keep pouring water into a bowl that is already full, what happens? The water does not stay in the bowl. It spills over the edge and is wasted. And the bowl becomes hard to carry, because the slightest movement makes it overflow. A bowl that is filled to a sensible level can be carried easily, and the water in it can be used.

Many of us treat our days like that bowl. We keep pouring in more tasks, more commitments, more effort, long after the bowl is full. We believe that more is always better. But past a certain point, more does not help. It spills over, as tiredness, mistakes, irritability and illness. And our lives become hard to carry, because the smallest extra demand makes everything overflow.

The image of the blade makes a similar point. A knife needs to be sharp. But if you keep sharpening it, grinding and grinding, the edge becomes so thin that it breaks. Effort is like sharpening: necessary and good, up to a point. Beyond that point, it begins to destroy the very thing it was meant to improve.

The last line of the passage is perhaps the most important: when the work is done, step back. The Daodejing suggests that there is a natural rhythm to effort: a time to work and a time to stop. Just as day is followed by night and summer by winter, work is meant to be followed by rest. A person who never steps back is fighting against this natural rhythm, and the Way, in the long run, cannot be fought.

Standing on Tiptoe

In chapter 24 of the Daodejing, there is another image that speaks to people who try too hard. In my own words: a person standing on tiptoe is not steady. A person who takes very long strides cannot walk far. A person who shows off does not shine. A person who boasts achieves nothing lasting (Daodejing, chapter 24).

Try standing on tiptoe for a moment. At first, you feel taller. You can see a little further. But very soon, your legs begin to ache, your balance wobbles and you have to come down. Standing on tiptoe is a way of reaching beyond your natural height, and it cannot be kept up. The same is true of walking with very long strides. You may go faster for a few steps, but you will soon tire and have to stop, while someone walking at a natural pace will keep going for hours.

Paloma had been living on tiptoe for years. She had been reaching beyond her natural capacity every day, taking on more than any person could sustainably carry. For a long time, she had managed it, as people can manage tiptoe for a while. But now her legs, so to speak, were aching, and her balance was failing.

The Daodejing does not say that we should never stretch ourselves. There are times when a burst of extra effort is needed: a deadline, an emergency, a moment of opportunity. But it suggests that we cannot live on tiptoe. Our ordinary, everyday pace needs to be one that we can sustain, like a natural walking stride. Then, when a burst of extra effort is needed, we have the strength for it.

This is the first lesson of these old books for tired hearts: there is a natural limit to effort, and when we keep pushing past it, effort turns against us. The art of not forcing begins with noticing when the bowl is full, when the blade is sharp enough and when we have been standing on tiptoe too long.

Tomiwa and the All-Night Studying

Tomiwa is twenty-three and studying engineering at a university. He is the first person in his family to go to university, and he feels a great deal of pressure to succeed. Before every exam period, he studies through the night, drinking strong coffee and sleeping only two or three hours. He believes that the more hours he studies, the better he will do.

But Tomiwa has noticed something strange. His results are good, but not as good as he expects, given how hard he works. In exams, his mind sometimes goes blank. He makes careless mistakes on problems he knows how to solve. After each exam period, he falls ill for a week. A friend of his, who studies far fewer hours and sleeps eight hours a night, often does just as well.

When Tomiwa read the passage about the bowl filled to the brim, he recognized himself. He had been pouring more and more hours into the bowl, long after it was full. The extra hours were not being absorbed. They were spilling over, as exhaustion, confusion and illness. His mind, like an over-sharpened blade, had become thin and fragile.

Tomiwa decided to try an experiment for one exam period. He studied for a fixed number of hours each day, with breaks every hour, and stopped at ten o'clock every night. He slept at least seven hours. It felt very uncomfortable at first. He worried that he was not doing enough. But in the exams, his mind was clearer than it had ever been. He made fewer mistakes. And for the first time, he did not fall ill afterwards. His results were the best he had ever had.

"I thought effort was like money," Tomiwa says. "The more you put in, the more you get out. But it is more like water in a bowl. After a certain point, you just make a mess." He still works very hard. But he now works in a way he can sustain, and he has learned to step back when the work is done, as the Daodejing advises.

Rasmus and the Farm That Never Rests

Rasmus is fifty-six and runs a small dairy farm with his wife. Dairy farming is demanding work. The cows must be milked twice a day, every day of the year, and there is always something to repair, plant, harvest or clean. For thirty years, Rasmus has not taken a single day off. He is proud of this. His father never took a day off either.

Last year, Rasmus began to have back pain that would not go away. He also noticed that he was more irritable, that he slept badly and that he no longer enjoyed the work he had loved since childhood. His wife was worried. She suggested that they hire a young farmhand for two days a week, so that Rasmus could rest. Rasmus refused. "A farmer does not rest," he said. "The animals do not rest."

His wife pointed out, gently, that the animals did rest. The cows lay down for many hours every day. The fields rested in winter. Even the land was left fallow every few years, so that it could recover. "Everything on this farm rests," she said, "except you."

This observation stayed with Rasmus. He realized that the farm itself followed a natural rhythm of work and rest, of growth and recovery, the very rhythm the Daodejing describes. Only he, the farmer, was trying to work without stopping. He agreed to hire the farmhand. On his first free day in thirty years, he did not know what to do with himself. He walked around the fields, sat by the river and fell asleep in the afternoon sun.

Over the following months, Rasmus's back pain eased, partly because his doctor suggested some changes to how he lifted and worked, and partly, he believes, because he was less tense. His mood improved. He began to enjoy the farm again. "I thought rest was a weakness," he says. "But the cows know better. The fields know better. I was the only one on the farm who had forgotten the Way."

Carmela and the Five Committees

Carmela is sixty-eight and recently retired after a long career as a social worker. She looked forward to retirement as a time of rest. But within months, she had joined five different volunteer groups: a reading programme for children, a food bank, a neighbourhood committee, a choir and a group that visited lonely elderly people. She also helped care for her grandchildren three days a week.

Carmela is a generous, energetic person, and each of these activities was worthwhile. But together, they filled her days completely. She found herself running from one commitment to the next, always slightly late, always slightly tired. She had less time for her husband than she had when she was working. She had stopped reading for pleasure, which she had dreamed of doing in retirement.

When Carmela's daughter gave her a copy of the Daodejing for her birthday, she read the passage about the bowl and laughed out loud. "This is me," she said. "I retired from one full bowl and immediately filled another." She realized that she had carried the habit of constant effort from her working life into her retirement, without asking whether she still needed it.

Carmela decided to choose. She kept the two activities that meant the most to her: reading with children and visiting lonely elderly people. She also kept the choir, because it brought her joy. She left the other two groups, explaining warmly that she wanted to give her best to fewer things. She kept her days with her grandchildren but reduced them from three to two.

With more space in her week, Carmela found that she gave more to the activities she kept, because she was not exhausted. She also found time for her husband, for long walks and for the books she had waited years to read. "I thought being useful meant doing everything," she says. "Now I think it means doing a few things well, with a full heart rather than a full calendar."

Practical Steps: Noticing the Brim

The first step is to notice when the bowl is full. Pay attention to the signs that your effort has passed its useful limit: tiredness that sleep does not fix, forgetfulness, irritability, careless mistakes, a feeling of distance from things you used to enjoy. These are signs that the bowl is overflowing. Notice them without judging yourself.

The second step is to stop pouring for a moment. Before adding anything new to your days, pause and ask: is there room for this? If the bowl is already full, adding more will only make it spill. Sometimes the wisest answer to a new demand is "not now".

The third step is to pour something out. Look at everything you are carrying and choose one thing to set down, reduce or share. Like Carmela, you might leave one commitment. Like Rasmus, you might ask for help. Like Tomiwa, you might stop at a fixed time. Pouring out one thing can make the whole bowl easier to carry.

The fourth step is to find your natural walking pace. Think about the pace of work you could sustain for months, not days. This is your everyday stride. Keep bursts of extra effort, the tiptoe moments, for times when they are truly needed, and come down from tiptoe when those times pass.

The fifth step is to step back when the work is done. At the end of a task, a day or a week, practise stopping. Close the computer, put down the tools, leave the work behind. The Daodejing calls this the way of heaven. You might call it simply the end of the working day.

The sixth step is to look at the natural rhythms around you. Like Rasmus on his farm, notice how everything in nature works and rests: day and night, seasons, the rising and falling of the tide. Let these rhythms remind you that rest is not the opposite of work. It is part of the same cycle.

Not Forcing Is Not Giving Up

There is an important misunderstanding to avoid at the start of this book. The art of not forcing does not mean giving up, being lazy or not caring. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi are not books for people who want to do nothing. They are books for people who want to act well, and who have discovered that straining and pushing do not always help.

Paloma did not stop being a dedicated teacher and mother. Tomiwa did not stop studying. Rasmus did not stop farming. Carmela did not stop volunteering. Each of them continued to work, often just as hard as before in the hours they worked. What changed was that they stopped pouring effort past the brim, stopped living on tiptoe and began to step back when the work was done.

It is also important to say that some people try very hard because they have no choice. A person working two jobs to pay the rent, a single parent with no support or a person caring alone for a seriously ill family member may not be able to simply pour something out of the bowl. For such people, the ideas in this book may help a little, but they cannot solve problems that come from real hardship. If this is your situation, it may help to look for practical support from family, friends, community groups or public services, and to be very gentle with yourself about what you can and cannot do.

Finally, if you recognize yourself in Paloma's story, with exhaustion that does not lift, a growing distance from work you once cared about and a feeling that you are less able to cope, please consider talking to a doctor or another qualified professional. These can be signs of a state that many people reach after long periods of stress at work, and it is much easier to recover from when it is noticed early. Paloma did this. She talked to her doctor, who listened carefully and helped her think about what she needed. Combined with the changes she made, it helped her begin to recover.

A Short Exercise: How Full Is Your Bowl?

This exercise helps you see how full your days have become. It takes about fifteen minutes.

Take a page and draw a simple bowl. Inside the bowl, write everything you regularly carry in an ordinary week: your work, your family responsibilities, your commitments to others, your household tasks, your hobbies, your worries. Write each one as a short phrase. Do not leave anything out, even small things.

Look at the bowl. Is it full? Overflowing? Is there any empty space left? Draw a line where you think the brim is, the point beyond which you cannot carry more without spilling. Be honest. Many people find that they have been carrying far more than they realized.

Now, outside the bowl, write the signs of overflowing that you have noticed in yourself recently: tiredness, irritability, mistakes, illness, loss of joy. Then choose one item inside the bowl that you could pour out, reduce or share with someone else in the coming month. Circle it, and write one small step toward it.

Finally, at the bottom of the page, write the last line of Daodejing chapter 9 in your own words, something like: "When the work is done, step back." Keep the page somewhere you will see it. When Paloma did this exercise, her bowl contained twenty-three items, and she drew the brim line through the middle of the list. The item she circled was "answering emails after nine in the evening". She told her colleagues that she would reply in the morning. To her surprise, nobody minded.

Chapter Summary

The Daodejing, traditionally said to have been written by Laozi, and the Zhuangzi, named after the thinker Zhuang Zhou, are ancient books about the Way, the natural way in which things happen, and about the art of not forcing. Very little is certain about their authors, and their language is open to many readings. In chapter 9, the Daodejing warns that filling a bowl to the brim is not as good as stopping in time, that a blade sharpened too much will not keep its edge and that when the work is done, one should step back. In chapter 24, it observes that a person on tiptoe is not steady and one who takes very long strides cannot walk far.

Paloma who never sits down, Tomiwa and his all-night studying, Rasmus and the farm that never rests and Carmela with her five committees all found that effort pushed past its natural limit turns against us, and that a sustainable pace, with time to step back, lets us give more, not less. Not forcing is not giving up. Long-lasting exhaustion deserves a conversation with a doctor or another qualified professional.

In the next chapter, we will look at the central idea of these books: wu wei, or not forcing, and the story of a cook whose knife never grew dull.