It is a time of chaos and disorder. Violence in the streets. Political breakdown. Climate collapse. War stirring in our hearts and emerging in the world.

This is a time to do something.

And yet, across thousands of years, the gentle voice of Lao Tzu keeps telling us to do non-doing.

How could he be right?

In our time, isn’t stillness complicity? Now is not the time to welcome, to let go, to step back, to be slow. Now is the time for swift and certain action.

But what if non-doing is the answer precisely because we live in perilous times?

And what if Circling is the single best place to practice it?

Non-doing is not doing nothing. It’s a way of doing from a place of serenity and simplicity, moving the way water does—totally without effort.

Lao Tzu wrote about this idea in The Tao Te Ching, a book that appears slim yet reveals itself to be an infinite well the more you reach in for wisdom. Through 81 verses, he approaches and reapproaches the practice of non-doing as if climbing a mountain by as many paths.

Simply (though imperfectly) put, non-doing allows the flow of the universe to happen, rather than trying to control how things unfold.

It has often been observed that one of the best ways to encourage non-doing in yourself is to become still and unattached, releasing yourself from the burden of needing things to be different. (You might already see parallels with the practice of Circling.)

It seems an impossible state to achieve in our age of instant communication. Before getting out of bed, we can see videos of mass protests, mosquitoes invading Iceland, absurdist humor, a toxic debate on gender, and a friend from college showing off his new dirtbike. We submerge our brains in the vat of social media, environments built to provoke high intensity engagement, which often leads to dramatically phrased conflict.

What’s worse, this internet appears to give us enough information to really know what’s going on. But how swiftly it became an Archon’s hall of mirrors, distorting our “realities” and setting us tilting at windmills.

If you feel suspicious that the giants you want to slay are mere windmills, consider how many people believe in crises that are obviously false. And consider how obviously real the crises are that concern you.

When we respond to a crisis from a place of doing (rather than non-doing), we hurl ourselves out into the world. We try to stop some things from happening that are already underway, just as we try to make new things happen out of nowhere. We furrow our brow as we ascertain and analyze the situation. We encounter anything and anyone not aligned with us as nothing more than obstacles.

To make the right things happen, we rush to keep up with events as they unfold. We vacuum up millions of data points to understand the interlocking issues. Trying to juggle so much at such speeds requires megawatts of energy and attention and focus, and without superhuman abilities, we are destined to fail in such conditions.

But if we release ourselves from a goal (a story we have about the way things are and the way they must be changed), we no longer need to know anything. In fact, our knowledge about the world begins to appear like so much tinsel leftover from last Christmas—something that glimmers but lacks any real relevance to us anymore.

If you start from stillness, simply welcoming what is going on, then you give yourself time and space. With enough of that, the next step often appears quite simple.

Which is to say, all we need to “do” is Circle.

Then, as if by magic, the crisis of the moment seems to disappear, or rather, it changes shape. The “crisis” was a story you had about some events you’ve been led to believe are real, the need to change how those events will most likely unfold, and the fear that these changes won’t happen in time. Under those conditions, how could you ever do enough?

But what if we just welcome those feelings and those stories to be there? What if we just sit with them a moment and see what else is going on? The need to move and understand and change drifts away long enough for a nice, long breath in and out.

Ahhh.

Okay. Here you are.

Letting events unfold does not mean sitting idle. Perhaps you unfold right along with them, as a sower of peace or fighter in the good fight.

When we begin to unfold from this place of stillness, we do not need to live out our destiny by doing. We do not need to reject how things are and struggle for them to be different.

Here lies the hardest paradox to hold (if we choose to believe old Lao Tzu), that through great effort, we only find stress, disharmony, and failure. And through effortlessness, there is no end to what we can achieve.

Come practice non-doing at our next in-person Circling event. Check out the details below or go to our MeetUp page.

Just a heads up, we’ve made major changes to the format, so we really recommend joining us at 5 PM.

We talked with the members of the Month of Potential collective to hear their story about living and working together (while Circling) for an entire month. It’s a fascinating interview that is sure to inspire some of you to carry out your own experiments in Circling-based community living.