At the end of Zhuangzi’s story, a ruler comes to observe Cook Ding at work. “Magnificent,” he says. “Having heard the words of a cook, I have learned how to nurture life.”
We Already Know How to Become Spontaneous
An experienced cook can whip up elaborate meals without recipes just by using her experience, training, and senses to know exactly how much salt or pepper will bring a dish to life, or exactly how long to simmer a creamy risotto. This is trained spontaneity. A veteran teacher can feel the moment when his classroom is starting to spiral out of control, and quickly grasp what he can do to bring all his students back to a state of calm. His years of experience trained him to respond spontaneously in just the right way at the right moment.
We know that learning any complex skill—be it a foreign language, a musical instrument, riding a bicycle, learning how to swim—requires an initial period of conscious, deliberate training. If you have ever learned to play the piano, you might remember how difficult it was at first, how clumsy your fingers felt on the keys, how confusing it was to associate each with a note, how hard it was to move your fingers independently of one another while your hands glided up and down the keyboard. None of it made much sense at first, nor did it sound very nice. In fact, had you “spontaneously” started pounding away at the keys, it most certainly would have been a painful experience for anyone in the room.
But slowly, over time, you started to get it, to string together notes that sounded like coherent melodies. Soon you could put left and right hands together, play chords, arpeggios, and tackle more advanced pieces. And that’s when the fun really began. You could play pieces from memory and even improvise new ones. Sitting down at the piano became an act of joy as you tapped into excitement and aliveness through playing music. What you were doing once you started to play in this free, spontaneous way was to move with the Way.
Think of how a concert pianist engages with her music and the audience. See the joy that comes from sensing exactly how she should touch the keys to elicit the tones that will resonate between her, her music, and her audience. Through the ability to sense and respond to the world with great skill, the pianist is moving with the Way. Deliberate training is how she arrived at this joyful freedom. It is the same training that enables us to maneuver a car through heavy traffic, lob a tennis ball over the net, or craft a compelling presentation for work. We just “know” what feels right without having to think about it. The effortless competence we develop in all spheres of our lives, from the mundane to the rarified, are examples of trained spontaneity.
The important point is that if we take Zhuangzi’s teachings to heart, we are not just becoming skilled tennis players, or employees, or cooks. We are changing our whole approach to life. Our pianist has not trained herself merely to play the piano; she has trained her entire way of being in the world.
Imagination and Creativity
We usually think about training toward mastery as limited to the specific skills we are looking to hone. How could putting in all those hours to master the piano or become proficient at tennis help you to train your entire way of being in the world?
It comes from recognizing the training as not just specific to the skill at hand but as training us to break the limited perspectives that we don’t even realize dominate our lives. When we do so, we gain something else too: entry into a state that fosters true imagination and creativity. Although we might not think of being in the zone as related to these things, for Zhuangzi, imagination and creativity stem directly from a state of continuous spontaneous flow.
We often think of creativity as emanating from a single source, a grand Creator. But Zhuangzi would have found such a notion terribly limiting. Instead, he would say that we should think of creativity as emerging when we move beyond the confines of a single great “self” and open ourselves up to the larger cosmos. He would urge us to remember that each of the creatives we revere—a Shakespeare, a Picasso, a Steve Jobs—gained inspiration from opening themselves up to the world, to the Muses, and to boundless curiosity about all that exists. They were opening themselves up to a river of creativity, to what Zhuangzi would contend was the Way.
Trained spontaneity means freeing ourselves of a conscious mind that is by definition restricted to a single self. Our mind gets in our way, causing us to battle against rather than flow with the Way. Yet in various parts of our lives, we do experience what it feels like to move with it. Think of a get-together with close friends, how the food and the conversation seem to flow effortlessly and joyfully as people become more and more in sync with one another over the course of the evening. You don’t have to think to yourself, Right now I should crack a joke, and in five minutes, I think I’ll tell everyone a story about what happened to me during vacation. The conversation just takes on a life of its own.
Or think of a neighborhood basketball game. You’re not using your conscious mind to calculate exactly what you need to do, strategizing that you have to turn 45 degrees this way and stand exactly three feet from the net at this moment. Rather, you flow constantly with a greater sense of your awareness of the whole space, the other players, and all that you must do throughout the game. This greater sense of the whole picture is the source of your prowess.
Even reading the Zhuangzi itself allows us to enter an expansive as-if world that opens up our imaginations. Flux and transformation are embodied by the wild and completely improbable stories that fill the text. We hear from fictional creatures; we read stories, like the butterfly story, purporting to tell us what the world looks like through an insect’s eyes. We encounter historical figures, such as Confucius, saying distinctly un-Confucian things. There are numerous surprise twists, puns, and poems that defy logic and understanding. The Zhuangzi was crafted deliberately to shake up our perspective and make us think differently about reality from the very moment we encounter it.
Of course, we are human; we can’t literally become a butterfly and aren’t expected to think we should. But by offering this story, Zhuangzi proposes an as-if question: What would it be like if I looked at the world as if I were a butterfly dreaming I am a human being? For that moment, we suspend reality and enter an alternate universe where we expand our ability to imagine all sorts of as-if possibilities in the broadest sense. The entire cosmos is open to us; a world in which everything is flowing into everything else.
None of this is prescriptive. Zhuangzi doesn’t tell us what we should do after we gain this different perspective; what comes from that is up to us. The key is the break of perspective itself.
True imagination and creativity don’t come from thinking outside the box or letting ourselves go wild, just as true spontaneity does not come from dancing on a table on the weekend while you remain in your tedious job. They don’t come out of great disruptive moments that break forth from an otherwise ordinary, drab life. They are part and parcel of how we live our every day; all moments can be creative and spontaneous when we experience the entire world as an open and expansive place. We get there by constantly cultivating our ability to imagine transcending our own experience.
Cultivating Expansiveness
When visiting a museum, we know that if we want to enrich our experience, we can hire a tour guide, or docent, who can help us experience things through her expert eyes. She can point out recurring motifs or the use of a certain color by an artist, things that we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. We know that if we wish, we can cultivate expertise in craft beer, or pro soccer, or digital photography—any interest that will enhance our appreciation and take our encounters with all of these things to a new level. Our acquired lens adds another layer to our world. We can go into a wine store, for example, and “see” and understand things that we couldn’t before; knowing the difference between a cabernet sauvignon and a Syrah becomes something enlivening and exciting. We can understand references to an Arts and Crafts–style house that deepen our reading of the setting in a novel. We don’t need to know any of these things to live
in the world, but our experience of the world is augmented when we do. We experience the very same reality differently from those who haven’t cultivated the same interests. But how often do we think of deliberately applying these principles of cultivation to other, commonplace aspects of our lives so that they can be lived with more expansiveness too?
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet, made famous the concept of a flâneur: a person who would stroll the city streets observing and taking in, with great openness, all that he saw. If you take a walk with a toddler, or a dog, or your grandmother, you’ll notice that they experience the walk differently than you do. The child will stop and gaze raptly at every rock and bug; the dog is tuned into an entire vibrating world of scent; your grandmother might be an avid gardener who names every flower or tree that you see. A walk with someone who has a different perspective on the world can allow you to step outside your normal patterns and to see the world not just differently but also with incredible openness. Through his or her eyes, a casual walk becomes imbued with greater depth and freshness. You read your surroundings differently; new dimensions become visible to you.
We focus on things based on habitual patterns of attention. On our morning commute, we might pay attention to little more than the radio, the exit signs, and the entrance to our parking lot, missing out on other things, such as the majestic sight of a flock of geese heading south. On a walk to the gym a few blocks away, we might be preoccupied by what we want to accomplish during our hour there and not even notice the delicious scents wafting from a restaurant nearby. Our habits limit what we can see, access, sense, and know.
But we all can become more conscious of our tendency to limit ourselves. Seeing the world through someone else’s eyes helps us break free and experience even the most seemingly mundane aspects of the world in richer ways. Even a trip to the grocery store becomes more than a tiresome chore if we go with a foodie friend who comes to life thinking of exactly what she could do with all the ingredients she sees. The same store that is so dull for us bursts with aliveness for her because of her excitement about items we wouldn’t notice on our own.
That lens is one we can acquire and cultivate. Once we understand how we see the world more expansively when we are with someone who amplifies our own experience, we can develop a nuanced appreciation for the world even when we are alone. We can constantly ask ourselves how someone else would view this world and remain ever aware that our perspective on it is not the only one that exists. As Zhuangzi shows us, it’s the principle of seeing things differently, or shifting our perspective, that allows us to experience life with newness and intensity.
Shifting Our Perspective
To wear yourself out to unify everything without understanding that they are the same—this is called “three in the morning.” What do I mean by that? A monkey trainer was handing out nuts, saying, “You get three in the morning, and four at night.” The monkeys were enraged. So he said, “All right, then, you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were thrilled. There was no difference between name and substance, but their happiness and anger were put into play. He simply shifted with them. This is how the sage harmonizes by using “right” and “wrong”—yet rests on Heaven’s wheel. This is called proceeding on two paths.
By now you probably understand how our conscious mind trips us up by clinging to arbitrary, distracting, and useless categories, as shown in the monkey example. There is no overall difference between “three in the morning and four at night” or its opposite, except in how we perceive them.
A radical shift in perspective allows us to view the world in the way that the Zhuangzi advocates. This is why it so often turns conventional wisdom on its head: in one story, a grievously disabled man lives his whole life begging for food. He is seen as pathetic, and yet he lives a long time, whereas other young men around him are conscripted into war. So who is the lucky one here?
Our conscious minds tend to focus on what “should be”—on what appears to be right. We think we know what is beautiful, what is large, what is virtuous, what is useful. Yet do we really understand how arbitrary the words and values we depend on actually are?
If a human sleeps in a damp place, his back aches and he becomes stiff. But is this true of a fish? If he resides in a tree, he is fearful and terrified. But is this true of a monkey? Which of these three, then, knows the correct place to live? Humans eat animals, deer eat grass, centipedes enjoy sweets, and hawks like mice. Which of these four knows what food is supposed to taste like? Monkeys mate with monkeys, deer with deer, and fish with fish. People say that Maoqiang and Lady Li are beautiful, but if a fish were to see them it would dart to the abyss, if birds saw them they would fly to the skies, if deer saw them they would gallop away. Which of these four knows what beauty is?
The problem is not simply that we have perspectives. So, after all, do the fish and the birds and the deer. The problem comes when we assume that our perspectives are universal, and we close off our minds. We create rigid distinctions and overly stable categories and values.
But what about categories that do seem clear, and values that seem unshakable and universal? Isn’t killing always wrong? How about robbing a bank? Imagine a robber who trains himself to pick locks flawlessly, break into a bank soundlessly, steal money, and escape without detection. If Zhuangzi is denying clear moral categories, then on what basis then could he ever say this is wrong? After all, isn’t the robber a perfect example of trained spontaneity?
What Zhuangzi would say, though, is that rigid distinctions lead to such situations in the first place. If you really were training yourself to flow with the Way, you wouldn’t be a robber. You wouldn’t kill anyone. A robber thinks in terms of distinctions from the start: he thinks in terms of my stuff, their stuff, I want this, I’ll take that. Someone who kills another is interrupting the flow of the transformation of things by prematurely ending life. For Zhuangzi, the argument against stealing, or killing, wouldn’t stem from the fact that they are immoral acts, but that they arise from making rigid distinctions.
Zhuangzi’s examples span the entire spectrum from prosaic to grand, but they are all about embracing life. You can embrace life by opening up yourself to see the task of ironing a shirt not as a tiresome chore but as an exercise in cultivating trained spontaneity; a head cold not as inconvenient but as a chance to cozy up in bed reading novels; a canceled wedding engagement not as heartbreak but as an opportunity for a new future. The Zhuangzi talks of those who have opened up their perspective fully. By embracing life, they have achieved true resonance with the Way. Metaphorically speaking, they are what Zhuangzi calls “true people.” They can “enter water without getting wet and fire without getting burned.”
Imagine what it would be like for little things and big things alike to cease to disturb us, instead becoming part of the excitement of life; things we find exciting and embrace. Imagine seeing things from all perspectives, and thus being able to understand that everything that happens is part of the process of flux and transformation. To return to Zhuangzi’s metaphor, with this change in perspective, we would become true people: able to walk through water without getting wet, through fire without getting burned.
The Final Distinction
If we truly became able to see all things from an unlimited perspective, we could celebrate all aspects of life, including the final distinction: mortality. Death is, after all, only one of the endless cycles of the Way.
Zhuangzi understood the fear of death. He knew that people fear the end of their existence as sentient beings. But in his mind, to think of death this way is to make a false distinction.
Some of the distinctions we perceive are undeniably true. You are you, a human being reading this book, and not the table in front of you or the chair you are sitting on. But these distinctions are momentary. To the extent that you think of yourself in a rigid way—as a human being at a certain moment in time—you risk not seeing yourself as part of a gr
eater world. When you die, that which makes you human becomes part of the larger, natural world. This is nothing to fear:
Zhuangzi’s wife died and Huizi went to console him. He found Zhuangzi squatting on the floor with his legs open, drumming on a pot and singing. Huizi said, “You lived with her, raised children with her, grew old together. To not cry at her death is bad enough, but drumming on a pot and singing—what could you be thinking?” Zhuangzi said: “Oh, it’s not like that. When she first died, how could I not grieve? But then I looked back to her beginning, before her birth. Not just before her birth, but before she had a body. Not just before she had a body, but before she had qi. In the midst of that amorphous chaos, there was a change, and she had qi; the qi changed, and she had a body; her body changed, and she was born. Now there is yet another change, and she has died. This is like the change of the four seasons: spring, autumn, winter, summer. Now she is residing in the greatest of chambers. If I were to follow her sobbing and wailing, it would show I understood nothing about our destiny. So I stopped.”
Zhuangzi is not saying that death is something to look forward to or to hurry along; on the contrary, life is to be lived to the fullest. Nor is he saying that he did not grieve when his wife died; his grief came, spontaneously. We grieve when people die because we love them and miss them.
Indeed, if we think of death purely from a human perspective, it is profoundly terrifying: it is annihilation of that part of us, or a loved one, that is human. But when we view death from the broadest possible perspective, we feel grief but also see, as Zhuangzi did, that our human form is a wonderful but temporary moment among all the transformations that make up the Way. We understand that this person has always been part of the Way and is still part of the Way. That person will become part of the grass, part of the trees, a bird soaring in the sky. If we understand that the stuff that is us has always been a part of the flux and transformation of the cosmos and always will be, then we no longer need to fear death; we become free to fully embrace life. We do away with the last of the distinctions that limit our experience of the world.
The Path Page 12