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I want to describe a quality of living that the Tao Te Ching is pointing at, not as a doctrine but as an experience most people have had briefly and almost immediately lost.
It is the quality of doing something and finding that the doing flows — not that it is easy, but that there is no gap between you and the action. The carpenter who has been doing the same cut for forty years. The parent who moves through the morning with a child without noticing the difficulty. The athlete in what sports psychologists call flow.
In these moments, the self does not get in the way. The usual running commentary — am I doing this right, what should I be doing instead — goes quiet. The action and the actor are not two things.
The obstacle is almost always the same: the mind running commentary, comparing, calculating. The mind that is already at the next task while the body is still in this one.
One act at a time. One genuine full presence to the thing that is happening. Not forever — just this one thing, right now.
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