A head of the communications department, every time he encounters a crisis, immediately holds a meeting. After the meeting, he feels it's not okay, then holds another meeting. The more meetings, the more cloudy the water becomes. Opinions piled up, emotions overwhelm emotions, and in the end no one remembers what happened initially. But everyone has a very positive feeling: We are handling the issue very drastically!.
An office worker is different. Every time there is something unhappy with a colleague, she goes home at night to review each sentence, analyze each look, and then conclude an increasingly complex scenario. The next morning, the water in her head not only is not clearer but also thicker.
The difficulty of "pure water" is that it stimulates people to act immediately. We feel that if we don't do something, we will lose. So we say more, think more, intervene more. But ironically, those "addments" are the reason why water never settles. Lao Tzu said something quite simple: Don't touch the muddy water, let it settle itself. But for modern people, "doing nothing" is the most difficult thing. Doing nothing means not controlling, not proving, not showing capacity. It makes us feel useless. So, we choose to do the opposite, stirring it up to show that we are very useful.
Another friend of mine once recounted that once he intended to reply to a very "tense" email. He wrote it down, read it again, and found it reasonable. But luckily the network was intermittent, the email could not be sent. He was annoyed and left it there. One hour later, he returned to read it, and he deleted almost everything. It turned out that what he needed was not a sharp answer, but a moment of silence.
That moment of silence is "to let the country be at peace".
Lao Tzu's philosophy sounds gentle, but practice is not easy. Because it requires us to accept that we don't always need to intervene. That sometimes, intelligence does not lie in handling quickly, but in knowing when to stop. Muddy water is not scary. What is scary is that the person standing in front of it does not want to stand still. And perhaps, maturity is when you see a puddle of muddy water in life, a contradiction, an emotion, a problem, instead of rushing to stir things up to get to the bottom of it, you quietly sit down, waiting for it to come in.
Sounds passive. But actually, it's a very high-level form of proactiveness. Because not everyone is calm enough not to do anything.
