Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing: Freeing the Elephant

[Image: “Wu Wei,” copyright © 2013 by George Clark, a/k/a user Buddhadog on Flickr — which, of course, is where I found it. (I use it here with Mr. Clark’s generous permission. Thank you again!) Finding images of these Chinese characters on the Web was no great challenge — but they’re generally straightforward representations. This one, unlike those others, exhibited character, not mere characters.]

Midweek — yesterday, as I write this — I joined the ranks of the idle aging. (Some confusion persists, at least in my head, over whether my “retirement” began on Tuesday or Wednesday. But it doesn’t really matter. All that matters to me, now and forever going forward, is that I no longer must follow a daily schedule and to-do list prescribed by someone other than me and, of course, The Missus.)

Spring 2020, almost anywhere in the world by now, is an “interesting” moment in history to find yourself with an empty calendar. I’ve had the luxury to imagine in advance how my days might pass; I haven’t been abruptly launched into a thumb-twiddling vacuum of inactivity — hanging in space, dazed, wondering what the hell just happened. I’ve appreciated the flood of newspaper and magazine articles presenting ideas about things to watch on TV, about the rediscovered pleasures of neighborhood walking, about books in which to linger. But honestly? Those pleasures have been on my radar for months. Nor have all the social-distancing rules of engagement freaked me out nearly as much as they have others. The Missus and my families live hundreds and thousands of miles away; we haven’t had much of an active in-real-life “circle” for years, not since our old writing workshops disbanded and the other participants — friends — moved away. The bulk of our daily human contact with loved ones hasn’t moved online: it’s been there for a long time.

And it all fits in quite neatly with a state of mind I’ve cultivated — knowingly and otherwise — all through adulthood…

One pre-retirement plan we had, back in the days before the hammer of COVID-19 flattened all plans everywhere, would have had us on a five-day “weekend” trip to Tampa, primarily to attend a large-scale classical music concert in an arena there. Secondarily, The Missus was toying with the idea of getting a tattoo; she has none, but a friend she knows professionally had recently opened his own tattoo shop in Tampa. She’d promised to stop by to boost his new career a little. She asked me, “Do you think you might get a tattoo while we’re there?”

Now, I’d never considered such a thing before. I’m not a joiner, for one thing: no need, real or imagined, to brand myself as a member of one herd versus another. And on an aesthetic level, well, I accept that body art — like other kinds — can work well as a form of self-expression… but have never been interested in it, as such, for myself.

But I promised to think about it. And as she worked up various possibilities for her own — possibilities which coalesced into probabilities when she first thought: An elephant! — I just sort of let the notion percolate in my own head.

What finally emerged from that process was a memory of Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen. That book, and others by him, had struck me hard when I first encountered them, nearly 40 years ago, and I’ve kept coming back to them for reminders like this:

The important difference between the Tao and the usual idea of God is that whereas God produces the world by making (wei), the Tao produces it by “not-making” (wu-wei) — which is approximately what we mean by “growing.” For things made are separate parts put together, like machines, or things fashioned from without inwards, like sculptures. Whereas things grown divide themselves into parts, from within outwards.…

In the words of Huang-po:

Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of the Dharma… It cannot be looked for or sought, comprehended by wisdom or knowledge, explained in words, contacted materially (i.e., objectively) or reached by meritorious achievement.

Now this impossibility of “grasping the mind with the mind” is, when realized, the non-action (wu-wei), the “sitting quietly, doing nothing” whereby “spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” There is no necessity for the mind to try to let go of itself, or to try not to try.

[sources for the above: here and here]

This, then, was the tattoo I imagined getting. It would have been placed in some not-readily-apparent location. (An ankle, I thought, but The Missus talked me out of that: ankles, she said, are among the worst — because most painful — places to get tattoos.) Just a small pair of ideograms:

The first, wu, is derived from a picture of a human with empty hands, splayed fingers. The second, wei, is to me the more interesting: it comes from an ideogram of a human holding onto — leading — an elephant by its trunk. Put together, the two thus say to me: letting the elephant go where it will.*

This seems an excellent frame of mind in which I (not at all necessarily anyone else) might pass retirement: I’d happily wear a brand like this for the rest of my life.

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* The “elephant” connection with The Missus’s own tattoo choice is just a fortunate coincidence! (I didn’t make the connection myself until a moment ago.)