Hi Reader,
I’ve been sitting with Lao-Tzu’s opening lines from the Tao Te Ching. Not just reading them, but really feeling them:
“The way that can be spoken of is not the true Way.”
It hit me differently this morning—maybe because I’ve been spending so much time talking about the path, and thinking about life, instead of walking it and living it. There’s a difference between describing the taste of honey and letting it melt on your tongue. I think I’ve been stuck in description.
Lao-Tzu suggests something radical: that direct experience leads to unconditional appreciation and unity, while conceptual thinking leads to conditional judgement and separation. That sentence landed in my gut. Because I’ve been caught in a web of conditional thinking—trying to figure out who I am by constructing an identity from thoughts, memories, and labels.
But who we think we are is not who we truly are. Our conditioned nature is not false, but it’s not the whole story. It’s a mask worn long enough to forget the face beneath it.
the way in is through now
Of course, this begs the ancient question: how do we free ourselves from conditioned thinking?
My answer, for now, is mindfulness.
Simple, grounded, breath-to-breath mindfulness.
To stop chasing the future or replaying the past and instead return—again and again—to this moment. To the warmth of the sun on my cheek. To the sparrow perched on a spire having his breakfast. To the sound of my own steps echoing through an ordinary Wednesday morning.
It’s no surprise that Yoda’s voice floats in here:
“This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing.”
That’s me. That’s most of us.
Conditioned to scan for danger or dream of escape.
Rarely rooted in now.
Rarely present enough to feel the ground beneath our feet and say, this is it. This is life, not the idea of it.
the tug of the future
But here’s where the sadness seeps in. Even as I begin to taste presence, there’s a whisper at the edge of my awareness:
“If I spend all my time experiencing the now, how will I shape the future I want?”
It’s the voice of productivity, of utility, of the myth that doing is the only valid form of becoming. And I feel it tugging at me even in my most mindful moments, reminding me of to-do lists, goals, and outcomes.
This tension—between the sacred now and the imagined future—feels like the core wound of modern life.
I’m trying to break the cycle.
To be instead of constantly trying to become.
To stop managing life like a project and start inhabiting it like a poem.
But it’s hard.
Even now, part of me is timing how long I’ve been “present,” and wondering when I’ll get back to doing something “useful.” And that’s the loop. The programming. The trap.
walking side by side with true nature
Lao-Tzu offers a quieter way. He reminds me that both the conditioned and the unconditioned are part of the Tao. That our habitual thinking is not something to eradicate, but something to see through—to become aware of—so that we can return to who we’ve always been beneath the noise.
Direct experience doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility.
It means letting presence become the root from which action grows.
And maybe that’s the reframe I need:
I don’t have to choose between being and doing.
But I do need to start doing from being.
So here’s where I’ll begin, again:
By walking the path without over-narrating it.
By breathing into the moment without needing it to justify itself.
By letting the present moment be enough—if only for a breath, a step, a glance at a bird.
Because every time I do, I remember who I am.
A Journaling Prompt for You
Where in your life are you orbiting the idea of the path, rather than walking it?
And what would it mean to take just one step—real, embodied, now—into direct experience?
With you in the quiet,
—Clay
Barefoot Philosopher & NLP Coach
“Be still. The path reveals itself not to those who speak of it, but to those who walk it with empty hands.”
