The Way of the Fearless Writer: Ancient Eastern wisdom for a flourishing writing life

There’s a phrase in Chinese, “wu wei,” that describes how I felt. In English, its translation is “non-doing,” but not in the sense of doing nothing. Non-doing is not about escaping anything or being lazy but instead refers to a deep level of connectedness with the world. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote about this more than 2,500 years ago in

Lao-tzu’s essential teaching of wu-wei, on the other hand, illustrates the futility of our attempts to control life. He emphasizes that it is only when you give up forcing or controlling anything that you begin to get the kind of control you always wanted, but never knew existed.