We're in the final third of a long semester. My students aren't the
only ones to tell of being overwhelmed - zoom keeps on sucking your
energy even when you've learned to call it "zoom fatigue," and
coursework just keeps coming, week after week. Many students are
slipping behind, and adding self-reproach to exhaustion, heartbreak,
isolation, and dread about the future.
Since I am meeting students in "Religion and the Anthropocene" one-on-one this week already, I let them persuade me to take take this week off. That means there's no assigned reading, no reading response. I'll still be signing into zoom during our regularly scheduled meeting time Friday morning, but nobody else has to.
The only problem is what to do with the originally assigned material for this week. Do we drop it, or bump the readings of one of our subsequent weeks? The syllabus is already chockablock. Fortuitiously the topic was/is Daoism, and one of the readings the Dao De Jing. If there's anything one might be able to do better by not doing it, it's studying Daoism. I've sent the students a few passages from the Dao De Jing, and told them that I don't expect them to read any more.
XIX
Eliminate the ‘sage’: forget ‘wisdom’
People will be a hundred times better off.
Eliminate ‘benevolence’: forget ‘rectitude’,
And people will have filial piety.
Eliminate cleverness: forget profit,
And there’ll be less thieves and rogues.
Superficial things are insufficient,
What is needed is all-embracing.
Exhibit the unadorned.
Hold fast to the un-carved block.
Avoid the thought of Self.
Eliminate desire.
XLVII
You can know the universe
Without leaving your house.
You can see the ways of heaven
Without looking out of your window.
The further you go
The less you know.
That’s why the wise achieve without moving,
Name what is, without needing to see it,
Accomplish great things without action.
XLVIII
In pursuing one’s studies
Something’s added each day.
In practising the Way
Something’s subtracted each day.
It grows less and less
Until one reaches non-action.
When one reaches non-action
Nothing is left undone.
It’s always through not interfering
That one can control the realm.
Whoever loves to interfere
Will never control the people.
