Loosen up, Live Spontaneously

Reexamine and transform your life with Chuang Tzu's (Zhuangzi) insights on spontaneity.

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In this week’s post, we explore Chuang Tzu’s conception of spontaneity. Specifically, we will look into how this idea is critical to defining our existence. As a foundational principle, it guides us to stay connected to our natural endowment and craft the life we want.

Moreover, we will examine what keeps us from living spontaneously through another key concept — the “formed mind” 成心. A grasp of this idea adds a valuable tool to your analytical and emotional management toolbox: you can easily manage your emotions in social interactions and strifes, allowing you to respond to the complexity of social dynamics with ease and peace. Imagine in the face of emotional storms when others panic and become restless, but not you. You are still undisturbed as if some mystical, spiritual power has descended on you.

In essence, with Chuang Tzu’s spontaneity, you not only learn to connect with your inborn nature to craft a life of your own design, but you also cultivate a mindset and capability to go through the world with more calm, less strife, and enhanced awareness of where you are.

In next week’s post, I will draw upon Chuang Tzu’s parables to dissect and reveal the various layers of cultivating spontaneous living through self-mastery, which is something that looks simple yet is often overlooked in today’s world. We can use the stories and concepts as timely reminders for self-improvement and mental clarity.

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Life is often viewed as a journey of searching and exploring, where each step offers reflections into who we are and how we interact with the world. Yet, for many of us, this journey revolves around chasing, setting goals, encountering failures and confusion, and constantly being entangled in internal chaos.

We can easily lose our sense of direction in this life. It happens when we are being pushed around. Desires, expectations, and obligations corner us into a particular mode of living. We are forcing ourselves against circumstances that are full of uncertainty and obstacles.

What’s worse, we can sense that there is not a stable and reliable internal compass to guide us through the complexity of living. In essence, we become clueless when it comes to how to manage our relationship with ourselves.

The paradox of self-management is that if we cannot establish a compatible relationship with our inner self, our interpersonal relationships will suffer. In other words, we may unwittingly project our own internal problems to the outside world if we do not pay attention within.

Yet, once we start looking within, meaning to face and understand our innermost feelings and thoughts honestly, we can make peace with ourselves.

This is important because, on a fundamental level, the reason we are living in pain and confusion is simply that we allow ourselves to live in a state of illusion. Do we want clarity? Or have we been making various excuses to cover the fact that we can bear with whatever life throws at us without giving a fight?

We need to peel off the layers we’ve put on, which presents us with a pseudo-reality we are positioned in. What we will have lost in specious consciousness, we will gain the capacity to live in harmony with our inner nature.

Spontaneity, in the Taoist perspective, is not about acting without thought but about aligning with the intuitive feeling of that which is naturally so. This means that when we act from inner clarity and autonomy, we do not unconsciously contend against circumstances.

Let’s look at a story from Chuang Tzu about a swimmer with incredible skill.

One day, Confucius was walking at a place called Lüliang, where the water falls from a height of thirty fathoms and races along for forty li. It was so swift that no fish or other creatures could swim in it. He saw a man dive into the river, assuming that the man may want to commit suicide. Then, he asked his disciples to line up on the river bank and pull the man out.

Yet, after a while, the man came out of the water and began strolling along the river while singing a song. Confucius was amazed by this scene and ran after him, and said, “I thought you were a ghost, now I see you are a man. May I ask if you have some special way of staying afloat in the water?”

“I have no way. I just started with what I was familiar with, grew up with my nature, and let things come to completion with fate. I enter with the inflow and come out with the outflow. I follow the way of the water, never thinking about myself. I don’t know why I do what I do, that’s destiny.”¹