Happy Birthday #35
The Center
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
- The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
天地之间，其犹橐龠乎？
虚而不屈，动而愈出。
多言数穷，不如守中
All that lies between heaven and earth is like a pair of bellows, is it not?
At rest, the bellows lack not for air;
but in action, they rapidly deplete themselves.
The more one talks, the sooner one is exhausted.
Better to hold the center.
- Chapter V, The Dao De Jing, Lao Zi
The good news is, I’m in love.
Each morning, we hold hands and meditate and clear our minds before the day begins.
“I want you to take a moment to hold space,” my love will say.
“Hold space for the present; hold space for you and for those around you just as you are. For all our hopes and dreams, for all that we want to achieve and be… we will get there. But for this moment, let’s hold some space for who we are right now… ”
And so I start each day happy and healthy and at peace and in love.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is…
Well, the bad news is that the world as we know it is descending into a widening gyre — a polarized vortex between competing extremes that holds no space at all for things as they are, and no space for compromise or cooperation or even communication across the divide.
On either side of that divide, loyalty outweighs compassion; violence for the cause is hailed as heroism, and tolerance for rivals is decried as treason.
Are you with Trump or the Squad? Pick one.
Do you stand with Hong Kong or Beijing? Pick one.
Or, as Public Enemy once put it with aptly grotesque simplicity:
“Black versus white. Good versus evil. God versus the Devil. Which side you on?”
“The eyes of all future generations are on you, and I say if you do not act, we will never forgive you.”
I want to make it very clear that I think young climate activist Greta Thunberg up there is a hero, and an inspiration, and that she might — just might — help save the world. I am unequivocally grateful for her service and unequivocally supportive of her cause.
Yet still there is something tragic about a child condemning an entire generation for not acting on an agenda, however noble that agenda might be. Greta recognizes the awfulness of it herself: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here, I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.”
But here we are. Noble, angry, and threatening never to forgive.
Look, I get it. Social justice, free speech, public safety, climate change — this stuff matters. The stakes are very high, passions run even higher, and if you’re not part of the solution then you’re part of the problem.
But the whole ‘forced to choose a side’ thing is, to me, the problem itself.
Not because I don’t have my beliefs (I do) or because I’m afraid of defending them (I’m not).
The problem is that my beliefs super-cede positions and parties.
Call it relativism if you must, but it’s a principled relativism — and it’s as good as bred in my bone.
My mother spent her entire life as a teacher and interfaith organizer. She worked to promote dialogue and understanding between different groups that believe in different things, because she believed that mutual understanding would enable all of us to lead richer, wiser, and more peaceful lives.
I’ve spent most of my career promoting dialogue and understanding across national, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Not because I “believe in America” or “believe in China,” but because I believe that if we can overcome the barriers to communication, there will be enough ground in the middle to build something collaborative and mutually fulfilling and, well, beautiful.
But the middle ground today isn’t a construction site — it’s a kill zone. Just ask Adam Silver. Or Varys.
“The center cannot hold,” Yeats warned.
And yet I refuse to abandon it. There are not many things I believe are worth fighting for, but this is one of them.
The center must be held.
But how?
How do we fight against fighting without just creating more fighting?
How do we tolerate intolerance without become more intolerant ourselves?
How do we, as the queen says of unending cycles of hurt and retaliation, “break the wheel”?
Well, let’s start by looking at how a wheel is made.
Or, at least, how wheels were made in Zhou Dynasty China some 2,500 years ago.
“三十辐共一毂，当其无，有车之用。
以为器，当其无，有器之用。
凿户牖以为室，当其无，有室之用。
故有之以为利，无之以为用。
Make a wheel. What is fitted are the spokes, but what is turned is the empty hub.
Craft a bowl. What is fashioned is the clay, but what is used is the empty space.
Build a house. What is constructed are the walls, but what is lived in is the empty room.
The asset is what is there;
But the value lies in what is not.
- Chapter 11, The Dao De Jing, Lao Zi
Five years ago, I shared a Confucian analysis of thirtieth birthdays:
“[implied in “standing at thirty”(三十而立) is] an emphasis not on autonomy and empowerment, but rather on duty and obligation... At thirty, I can no longer believe that I am beholden to none, and I feel compelled to devote a greater portion of myself to the broader social good.”
The Confucians were all about doing that sweet sweet social good — they wanted to 行义, conduct acts of righteousness, the same way Jews want to do mitzvah and millennials want to have impact.
In classical Chinese philosophy, the Confucians were builders. They strove to build a better world, with complex hierarchies and protocols designed to create order out of the chaos around them.
The problem is that these days everyone’s a Confucian, but there’s not a lot of consensus on what “order” means. So we each go out and struggle to build our own vision of order, and get angry at all the other Confucians building their order out of our communal chaos.
Confucians are activists, and partisans, and depending on their vision of order and yours, they might be among your most beloved heroes, or your most reviled villains, and this is all well and good and it’s basically been this way forever.
Confucianism is fine. More than fine, actually — it is essential. It inspires us to be ambitious, to make an impact, to build.
But that’s only half of who we are.
My mentor from a century past, the great Lin Yutang, suggests that deep within each and every person there lives both a Confucian and a Daoist — our ambitious yang and our patient yin — and that one is not whole without the other.
And so I find myself on my 35th birthday reading not the Analects of Confucius, but the Dao De Jing of Lao Zi.
What’s the difference between the Confucian and the Daoist within us?
If we were indulging in the polarization of our times, we could cast caricatures of the two — the arrogant and self-defeating Confucian, foolishly struggling against entropy; and the lazy and cowardly Daoist, sitting idly on the sidelines as the world is dominated by the willful and strong.
But we’re not choosing sides here, remember — that’s sort of the whole point.
And the Daoists are, as a matter of fact, no less interested in a better existence than their Confucian brothers and sisters. But they don’t try to build a better existence; rather, they try to better align themselves with the natural rhythms of existence as it is. Their highest ideal is not order, but harmony.
To achieve harmony, the Daoists practice something called wuwei, which is often mistranslated as “inaction,” and is often misunderstood as a sort of passive resignation, a hapless surrender to the status quo.
But wuwei is far from a surrender; quite the contrary, it is a tool of great empowerment.
“为无为，则无不治,” the Dao De Jing promises: “Practice wuwei, and nothing will be beyond your rule.”
Wuwei doesn’t mean you sit back and do nothing and let others run over you. Wuwei means you exert influence without interference; that your power is derived not from the ability to make judgements and exert control, but rather your ability to perceive the natural rhythm of things and guide yourself and those around you into alignment with those rhythms.
If that sounds a bit abstract, let’s put it to work in our lives.
We can practice wuwei in our professional lives.
The nicest compliment I ever received as an interpreter was:
“Oh! I, uh… forgot you were even there.”
Really, you should only ever notice your interpreter if something goes wrong, the same way you only think about your electric utility when the power goes off. When interpreting is done right, the speaker and the listener just talk to each other as if there were no interpreter. They just talk.
Interpreters might let their inner Confucian come out a bit to keep the conversation in order — add a little context here or simplify things there — but too much interference — too much adding or subtracting — inevitably creates friction to the natural flow of conversation. So the good Daoist interpreter seeks not to build a dialogue out of linguistic chaos, but rather to guide the speaker and listener toward harmony by aligning their words into a rhythm that they both understand.
We can practice wuwei in our political lives.
Campaign slogans aside, Barack Obama didn’t actually work to change America; he worked to better align us. From his breakout convention keynote in 2004 (“there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America”) through two presidential terms, he consistently fought to uphold the center — rejecting divisive politics and bringing more harmony, empathy, and diversity into the White House than had ever before been seen.
His agenda was progressive, but his tactics relied on consensus, not coercion… even if it sometimes meant stalemate. Faced with more partisan hostility than any president in recent memory, he never fought fire with fire; he remained dedicated to a politics of engagement, in service not of party but of realm, and responded to his rivals’ attacks with the most wuwei gesture in presidential history:
For all his sensitivity, though, Obama never lapsed into lazy relativism. Criticizing the media for its failure to distinguish candidate Trump’s transgressions from Clinton’s, he memorably declared that “we cannot afford to act as if there’s some equivalence here.”
The pursuit of harmony does not mean the disintegration of order, or false equivalence between categorically different things. Holding space for your inner Daoist does not mean giving up on your Confucian ideals; it simply means balancing them.
But the real lesson for me this year — and where Daoism has really taken root for me— has not been in my profession or my politics; it’s been in my heart.
We can practice wuwei in our love lives.
Meet my love.
We’ve been together for the better part of a year, and the Daoists might say that we 音声相和 — that from the collision of our tones, a harmony is born.
There are a million facets of our relationship that have excited and inspired and enlivened me this year — a million moments of delight and gratitude and growth — but those are not for this letter. The point for our purposes is this:
In love, as in life, we must hold the center.
We all know the Confucian parts of a relationship — the building of a life together, the honoring of roles and responsibilities, the daily rituals of respect that must be observed to create order and unity out of the scattered chaos of individual lives.
But the relationship is just what you build, it’s the asset; the value is in the space within that relationship, the empty space we call love. Love is empty of judgement, ambition, and control; but in its emptiness, it is the richest and most powerful force of all that lies between heaven and earth.
To love someone and be loved is a constant practice of wuwei — influencing and being influenced, but without interference; taking action and being acted upon, but without coercion; each of us transforming — not bent to the other’s will, but rather being slowly aligned to each other’s rhythm. Asking each day not who is right or wrong, but what will work best for us?
Dearest friends and family,
At 35, I am at the center of my life — not young, but still far from old; not inexperienced, nor, I hope, too set in my ways.
The Confucian in me remains committed to building the world I want to live in, a better world for my family and my community and the US and China and and for all people and the environment around us.
But the Daoist in me is committed to holding the center — to promoting dialogue and tolerance and understanding, even when it is unpopular or inexpedient to do so. To being patient, even when the stakes are high. To not taking sides, even if I get a little burnt.
I have faith that one day the pendulum will swing back toward engagement; one day the widening gyre will close.
When that happens, I want to be remembered for having defended the center when it was weakest. I hope you will be by my side.
Or don’t be by my side! We don’t have to be on the same team, I’ll still love you, that’s the point!
And widening gyre or not, you still owe me a birthday present — and none of this “empty cup” crap, either…
For my birthday, I’d like to ask all of you to make a donation large or small to Education in Sight, a charity that I’ve known and supported for many years and which works tirelessly to build a better, clearer world for young people in poverty.
Also, if you’ve made it this far and enjoy waxing poetic, join our nascent Dao De Jing Dinner Club for more exploration of Daoist principles as applied to work, life, politics, and love. Sharing is caring, etc.
Ok, folks — the more one talks, the sooner one is exhausted. Lest my bellows deplete, let me conclude simply by thanking you for being in my life, however distant, and for the influence on me that you’ve had, however unwitting.
At the end of the day, the center is only worth fighting for because of the greater love that resides within it— in that sense, we are all making the world a better place, every day, simply by being.
But don’t strive too hard.
Yours truly,
Jonathan
