Mohini Kundu

I am a reforming Bisy Backson. If you don’t know what that is, let me back up. First, you need to know that Winnie the Pooh, the beloved children’s book bear, actually represents one of the core tenets of Taoism. Yes, ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is about Taoism. You’re welcome.

Pooh Bear’s character and actions symbolize the “Uncarved Block,” or pu. Pu is a state of pure, natural potential, free from any human judgements or desires. What if you lived in complete harmony with your nature and the flow of life? That’s Pooh.

Rabbit, on the other hand, is pretty textbook Bisy Backson. And honestly, so is most everyone I know. It’s someone who is running the hamster wheel ragged, constantly stressing and pacing towards a future goal that seems ever out of reach. They’re always, always, always, “busy, back soon.”

Something about how I was raised and the culture around me made it seem impossible to be any other way. Of course I was always thinking of the next test, the next grade, the next opportunity for accomplishment in school and then work. The alternative meant being a failure. We hear that success isn’t everything quite often nowadays, but that’s at least partly because so many of us fully believed the opposite our whole lives and need help unlearning it.

If we dumb things down, what Taoism wants us to do couldn’t be simpler: nothing. Be present in the moment, don’t think too much, don’t try to be anything other than what you are. But we’ve ventured so far from that state that many of us feel like we need several manuals to find our way back (guilty). Modern society conditions us to strive against nature from the moment we open our eyes in the morning. We can be more and do more now than ever before. I’ve been optimizing everything for as long as I can remember, so it’s difficult to stop.

Lately, I’m trying to put my days through a different lens: What would life look like if I simply stopped fighting it?

I was ill recently, ill enough that I couldn’t get out of bed for long. And it legitimately terrified me, because I have so much to do! But what if for once I thought, “I’m sick. Time to rest.”

Perhaps then when I feel great I’d think, “I have tons of energy. Let’s spend it.” Granted, I don’t know anyone who regularly feels like they have energy to spare. And that might be because we keep skipping life’s cues to take rest. They literally come along every night. The world darkens, your body slackens and your eyes fill with sleep — but instead we turn up the lights, make our devices brighter, and keep pushing.

I think of my journey over the last several years as learning how to live. It began with elaborate morning and night routines. I’d need a checklist to ensure I stretch and hydrate when I get up, rather than following the natural rhythms of a morning: a parched tongue, a stiff neck. At night I plan activities to wind down rather than just drinking in the twilight, letting my mind go quiet.

In ‘The Tao of Pooh’ Benjamin Hoff writes:

“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, ‘This isn’t supposed to be happening this way,’ and trying harder to make it happen some other way.”

Instead of planning my days, I’m trying now to simply let them unfold. It demands that I fully open my senses and observe the world around me — not as I want it to be, but just as it is.