—Untie your knots. Detach from what keeps you tied to worldly patterns. Untie the knots that bind you to a life that’s dedicated to showing profit and demonstrating victory, and replace them with silently contemplating the Tao in “the secret embrace.”
—Soften your glare. Notice when your need to be right is glaringly obvious, and let the soft underside of your being replace your rigid stance. Your impulse to glower at external events is alerting you that you’re out of touch with your inner silent knowing.
—Settle your dust. Don’t kick it up in the first place! Realize your inclination to stir up dust when you feel a diatribe about to erupt on how others ought to be behaving. Stop in the middle of pounding the table or angrily screaming and just observe yourself. Since your emotions are like waves on the ocean, learn to watch them return to the vast, calm, all-knowing Source.
Do the Tao Now
Spend an hour, a day, a week, or a month practicing not giving unsolicited advice. Stop yourself for an instant and call upon your silent knowing. Ask a question, rather than giving advice or citing an example from your life, and then just listen to yourself and the other person. As Lao-tzu would like you to know, that’s “the highest state of man.”
57th Verse
If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.
How do I know this is so?
Because in this world,
the greater the restrictions and prohibitions,
the more people are impoverished;
the more advanced the weapons of state,
the darker the nation;
the more artful and crafty the plan,
the stranger the outcome;
the more laws are posted,
the more thieves appear.
Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
If I keep from imposing on people,
they become themselves.
Living Without
Authoritarianism
In this and some of the following chapters of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu counsels the rulers of 2,500 years ago on how and why to pursue a high quality of leadership. His advice is pertinent today, in the 21st century, to all forms of leadership, including government, business, and, in particular, parenting.
The essential message in this 57th verse is to allow rather than interfere. Now I don’t interpret this to mean letting an infant crawl into traffic or leaving a child alone near a swimming pool—obviously, you must be sensible when supervising those who could harm themselves or others. What I believe Lao-tzu is conveying here is that allowing is quite often the highest form of leadership. He states that “more people are impoverished” in societies with excessive restrictions and prohibitions; the same can be true in families with commandments that must be obeyed without question. The more authoritarian any system is, the more outlaws will appear.
On the other hand, when children are encouraged to explore and exercise their inquisitiveness, they’re inspired to be their best with little need for regulation. So when you change the way you view the need for rules, family members will tend to make decisions based on what’s best for everyone rather than themselves. See what happens, for instance, if you drop an absolute curfew time for your teenagers, asking them to just be sensible about when they come home and to notify you if they’re going to be later than normal. You may find that because you didn’t impose yourself on them, they end up coming home even earlier than when they had a strict curfew governing their conduct.
Examine the restrictions that you enforce in your family. Remember that effective parents don’t want to be leaned on; they want to make leaning unnecessary. After all, you want your children to be responsible, healthy, successful, and honest—not simply because you’re there to monitor them, but because it is within their nature to do so. So set an example and let them see that it’s possible to be self-sufficient and enormously successful. Allow them to learn to trust in their highest nature, rather than having to thumb through a rule book to decide what’s right.
Change the way you look at the need for edicts, laws, and prohibitions, and see yourself as someone who doesn’t need to rule with an iron fist. Then enjoy taking this revised view of your leadership abilities into every area of your life where you’re considered to be “the boss.”
What follows is some 21st-century advice based on this verse that was written 2,500 years ago:
Practice the art of allowing yourself.
Begin by letting yourself be more spontaneous and less regimented in your daily life: Take a trip without first planning it. Go where you’re instinctively guided to go. Tell the authoritarian part of you to take a break. Introduce a different side to yourself and the world by affirming: I am free to be myself. I do not have to live by anyone else’s rules, and I release the need for laws to regulate my behavior.
Practice the art of allowing others.
Catch yourself when you’re about to cite a rule as a reason for saying no to a child or someone you supervise, and instead consider the ramifications of saying nothing and just observing. When you change the way you look at your role as a leader, you’ll find that very few edicts are necessary for people to conduct the business of their lives. Everyone has a strong sense
