Do nothing

“I can of my own self do nothing.” I am just coming to see how deep this truth goes. I was shredding my 2015 diary yesterday and came across this jotting: “Change nothing. Do nothing. All that is required of you, He performs.” It was in my hand, but I didn’t write it. Maybe Joel Goldsmith was briefly running things. Truth is, we do not know why we do what we do. An inner power acts; we think we’re doing something. “I did it!” we say. Or, expanding on the delusion, “High five!” Or shrivel up like a dried blueberry, as I did on a call-in show back in the day when no one called in. Are we actors? Plainly, no. We are the acted upon, the done-through. “Do you know how to do nothing?” asked Lao Tzu, pointing to the one thing we can be sure of: It’s all a mystery, top to bottom.

Life

We do not make it happen. We are to whom it happens. We are not actors. We are the the acted upon. The truth is what surprises us, what we did not foresee.

Not me

There is a statistical likelihood that my heart will beat 2.5 billion times before it stops. Now obviously I am not beating my own heart. Nor am I performing any other of the body’s myriad functions. So who is the actor?