Coping with a Constipated Universe

Sometimes the universe gets constipated. There’s no other way to describe it. No matter what you do, or how hard you hustle, your efforts go nowhere.

You send out queries or your resume or invitations to connect, and there’s no response. Your product or design is pending endless reviews and approvals, and your house has sprung a leak that no one will fix over the long weekend. You attempt to pay a friend with Paypal, or share your Google One storage with family, and technology suddenly chokes, because it cannot process that friends and family might just live across national borders. You fall in love with a TV show and it goes on hiatus. All the while, you’re stuck in some bureaucratic nightmare for taxes, visas, or a renewed passport.

Something isn’t working, and no matter how hard you push, there is an invisible, massive boulder in the digestive tract of the world that you simply can’t dislodge.

In the past, I found these moments to be extremely frustrating and demoralizing. I was certain I was doing something wrong, that if I just changed something – my attitude, my approach, hell, my body or my wardrobe – I’d turn things around with sheer will-power.

To quote The Apothecary Diaries, “Youth is such a scary thing.”

Friends and therapists alike have mentioned that sometimes, you just need to sit in discomfort. What’s needed is being, not doing. I find this almost impossible. Maybe it’s because my natural temperament is both restless and vigorous (vata and pitta dosha, according to the Ayurvedic terms), but stillness feels like torture.

So I strive for the thing closest to stillness: reading. In particular, right now, I’m re-reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. In a footnote, LeGuin says:

Over and over Lao Tzu says wei wu wei: Do not do. Doing not-doing. To act without acting. Action by inaction. You do nothing yet it gets done…

It’s not a statement susceptible to logical interpretation, or even to a syntactical translation into English; but it’s a concept that transforms thought radically, that changes minds.

Here are some verses from the text that elaborate on this:

That’s why the the wise soul

does without doing,

teaches without talking.

The things of this world

exist, they are;

you can’t refuse them.

When you do not-doing,

nothing’s out of order.

Can you keep the deep water still and clear,

so it reflects without blurring?

Can you love people and run things,

and do so by not doing?

I think about these in both my work and in writing. Work is a cacophony, reflecting both the excitement and the turmoil of the world. In every meeting, there are multiple conflicting opinions each fighting to be heard. I used to think my job was to either reconcile those conflicting opinions or make a decision about which one was “right.” But the very idea that any opinion is right and the others are wrong created the turmoil that meant conversations got stuck. People became entrenched in their opinions and dug their heels in. Instead, creating the space for conflicting opinions to be heard and simply exist – “they are; you can’t refuse them” – brought down temperatures and allowed people to see things as many-sided and complex, without feeling the need to attack that complexity head-on. Things got unstuck pretty fast.

In writing, I’ve been mulling (for years now) about the concept of the protagonist’s agency. The very first version of Driving by Starlight was rejected because the protagonist was too passive – things happened to her; she didn’t wrest control of her circumstances. At the time I was annoyed. She’s a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia; how much can she really do? But YA, especially dystopian YA, expects teenagers to grow up faster, to become leaders, to overthrow governments. The unfairness of this – placing the burden of changing society upon its most vulnerable – is justified by the Hero’s Journey narrative. Even the more feminist Heroine’s Journey expects agency. Doing, acting, is how women must find wholeness in patriarchal society.

Is there an alternative, for narrative structure and for life? I believe there is, and moreover that it is necessary. What does wei wu wei look like in narrative, and why is it so powerful?

Here are some narrative tropes I’ve seen in more Taoist stories and how they contrast with the tropes we already know:

1. Accepting the death of a loved one: Character A dies unjustly and tragically. Character B lives on, caring for the son A left behind and striving to live up to the ideals of A. B does not pursue vengeance, does not kill themselves, and does not follow A to the underworld to rescue A from Hades / Death.

2. Accepting the vulnerability of others in silence: Character A has been emotionally guarded for $reasons (is royalty, a man, or coping with trauma). A finally lets down their guard around B, either confessing some emotion or crying or being honestly angry. B says nothing to fix the problem, just sits there quietly.

3. Doing your job, instead of chasing the latest fire: Character A is very important to B (a child, a lover, etc.). A is kidnapped or must leave on a dangerous mission. B accepts this, but B has their own important mission, e.g. B is a doctor or a ruler or a soldier. B worries about A, but focuses on doing their own work, trusting A to take care of themselves.

Why do I find these so powerful? Stories are emotional guides, first and foremost, helping us navigate ambiguity through empathy. From a Western perspective, some of these tropes may seem impossible to empathize with, because they are about not-doing rather than doing. Surely, B is a horrible person, to not do everything in their power to save A from their fate or protect them from the world or join them on their dangerous mission.

This expectation of agency, of ever more action in the face of insurmountable odds, is a form of exploitation we’ve learned to accept as normal. To withdraw from conflict, to listen rather than speak, to resist by not-doing, is seen as weak, cowardly… feminine.

But it takes real strength to ignore the voices that say such things, that call us lazy for not overworking ourselves, or weak for not pushing past our limits. Sometimes, all we need to do to dislodge the boulder is to breathe, and keep the deep water “still and clear” enough to absorb others’ turmoil without adding our own.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll probably like some of the essays in The Divine Comedy of the Tech Sisterhood & other stories, which is now available in an utterly gorgeous paperback.