Chapter Six - Tao: The Flow That Cannot Be Forced

CHAPTER SIX

Tao: The Flow That Cannot Be Forced

ZEN GAVE ALAN Watts the laugh.

But Taoism gave him the rhythm.

If Zen was the lightning bolt of paradox, disruption, and empty laughter, the Tao was the deep hum beneath it all. The invisible current. The dance you didn’t choreograph but somehow already knew the steps to.

When Watts started talking about the Tao, he didn’t sound like a preacher anymore.
He sounded like a river.

He loved quoting the opening line of the Tao Te Ching:

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.”

Which, to him, meant: “Don’t take any of this too literally. Especially not me.”

Taoism wasn’t a religion, it was a noticing. A noticing that life moves best when you stop trying to stiff-arm it. That nature does just fine without micromanagement. That water is the strongest element precisely because it never tries to be strong.

And that… hit different.

Because the West was raised on dominion.
Control the land. Conquer the enemy. Master the self.
Everything was a battle.

But Watts looked around and said, “Wait. Nature doesn’t fight itself. Why are we?”

If Taoism had a “main move,” it was wu wei. The art of effortless action. Not laziness or passivity, but alignment.

It’s the way a surfer rides a wave instead of punching the ocean. The way a tree grows without spreadsheets or meetings. The way you breathe without thinking about breathing. Unless you're stressed, then you're doing it wrong.

Watts explained this better than anyone.

He talked about how the best martial artists don’t resist, they yield.
The best thinkers don’t try to “solve,” they observe.
The happiest people aren’t chasing happiness, they’re just living.

And the Tao is not a thing.
It’s what things do when left alone.

Alan didn’t turn Taoism into an aesthetic.
He didn’t wear robes or speak in proverbs.
He simply pointed out that everything was already flowing, and that our stress and exhaustion came from pretending it wasn’t.

The Tao said, “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

And suddenly you’d realize how much of your life was spent stirring the mud.

Watts described Taoism as a kind of intelligent surrender.
Not giving up, but getting in tune.

Stop paddling upstream. Stop trying to outwit the rain.
Let go of the wheel, and watch what happens.

And just like that, Alan had done it again.

He took a concept so ancient and subtle that most people couldn’t even pronounce it and made it feel like a way of being human that was somehow… obvious all along.

The Tao wasn’t Chinese or foreign to him. It was home.

You just hadn’t noticed you’d never left.