Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred, and cannot be improved. — Tao te Ching
I was standing in line at the grocery store a few months ago — one of those ordinary moments that shouldn't hold any particular weight — when I overheard two women behind me talking about the state of the world. Their voices were tight, clipped, heavy with a kind of exhausted outrage that I suspect many of us carry these days. One of them said something that stayed with me long after I'd loaded my groceries into the car and driven home: "I just don't know what to do anymore. Everything feels like it's falling apart."
I stood there with my avocados and my almond milk, and I felt the truth of her words land in my body. Not because I agreed that everything is falling apart — though I understand why it can feel that way — but because I recognized the particular quality of helplessness in her voice. That feeling of wanting so desperately to make things better and having no idea where to begin.
It's a feeling I've sat with many times myself. And over the years, I've come to understand something about it that has fundamentally changed how I move through the world.
The Paradox of Wanting to Fix What Is Sacred
The Tao te Ching — that ancient, luminous text that has been whispering its wisdom to humanity for over two thousand years — opens with a statement that can feel almost confrontational in its simplicity: Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred, and cannot be improved.
When I first encountered these words, decades ago now, I bristled. Of course the world can be improved, I thought. Look at all the suffering. Look at the injustice. Look at the cruelty. Surely we're meant to do something about it.
And we are. But — and this is the paradox that has taken me most of my adult life to truly understand — the how matters as much as the what. Perhaps even more.
It can be genuinely difficult to know how to react and how to be when we look out into the world today. Division has become the focus, rather than diversity. Danger, rather than safety. Isolation, rather than community. And although our leaders undoubtedly mean well — most of them, anyway — many governments have become so mired in bureaucratic self-interest that leading with heart-courage has become almost impossible.
So what do we do? Where do we begin?
The Body Politic Is a Body
Here's something I find endlessly fascinating, and I think it holds a key to understanding our current moment: if we correlate our planet and the state of humanity to our physical bodies, what would we be experiencing?
Emotional disturbance. Significant loss of normal function. Pain. All symptoms of a serious imbalance.
Our bodies have defense systems designed to protect what is most necessary for life and manage our stresses in the least harmful way possible. Your immune system, your nervous system, your endocrine system — they're all working in concert, constantly calibrating, constantly seeking equilibrium. But when a threat is perceived as too great, these systems can go into a fighting frenzy, rising up with drastic, sometimes even destructive force in an all-out attempt to preserve the status quo.
Does that sound familiar? It should. Because it's exactly what we're witnessing on a collective level.
Fight — along with flight and freeze — is an automatic reaction to something perceived as life-threatening, initiated from the most primitive part of our brain. It served our ancestors well when they needed to escape predators or defend their families from immediate physical danger. But once the acute moment of danger has passed, it's not meant to keep running the show.
"He who overcomes by violence will be overcome by violence." — Whaley, The Tao and the Power
When we stay locked in fight mode — individually or collectively — our body's energy becomes dedicated to combat and our minds attuned to opposition. This vigilance easily spills into many other aspects of our lives. We start seeing enemies everywhere. We begin to perceive difference as danger. We lose access to the very faculties — creativity, compassion, nuanced thinking, genuine listening — that we most need in order to navigate complexity.
The Energy We Carry
Here is something I've observed again and again, both in my own life and in the lives of the people I've had the privilege of working with over the years: when we get caught up in a negative response to something in the world, our energy darkens. It gets heavier. And unless we realize our knee-jerk reaction and find ways to deliberately shift it, this heaviness will weigh us down not just in this moment, but likely the next.
I want to be very careful here, because I'm not suggesting that we should bypass our feelings or pretend that painful things aren't painful. That would be a kind of spiritual dishonesty that I have no interest in. Anger, grief, outrage — these are legitimate, important responses to genuine injustice. They carry information. They carry energy that, when channeled wisely, can move mountains.
But there's a difference between feeling anger and becoming anger. There's a difference between acknowledging grief and drowning in it. There's a difference between responding to injustice with clarity and reacting to it with the same contracted, combative energy that created the injustice in the first place.
Because our physiological wiring is sense-oriented, of course we are constantly interacting with and being affected by the external world. As humans, that's simply the way we are. We're porous. We're permeable. We absorb the emotional weather around us the way a sponge absorbs water.
But as humans, we also possess something extraordinary: the capacity to become aware of our inner state and consciously clean up our own pollution.
The Shift That Changes Everything
When we are oblivious to being down-shifted — when we don't realize that our nervous system has dropped into a defensive posture — we're easy prey to whatever the wind blows. A provocative headline can hijack our entire afternoon. A careless comment from a stranger can unravel our sense of well-being. We become reactive rather than responsive, tossed about by forces we haven't even identified.
But becoming more perceptive of how we are feeling — truly feeling, in the body, not just in the mind — gives us something invaluable: the opportunity to stabilize ourselves. And this stabilization affects not just this moment, but the next one, and the next.
This is not a small thing. This is, I believe, the most revolutionary act available to us.
Things may appear to be falling apart. Our institutions may be straining. Our certainties may be dissolving. But our consciousness — the quality of awareness we bring to each moment — will determine how things get put back together. Not the politicians. Not the pundits. Not the algorithms. Us. You and me. The quality of presence we cultivate in our own bodies, in our own homes, in our own communities.
Beyond Fighting What's Wrong
Now, don't get me wrong — we absolutely should be attending to the forces behind our personal pain as well as what's behind racial prejudice and planetary distress. I'm not advocating for passivity or withdrawal. The world needs our engagement, our voices, our courage.
But let's be careful — deeply, thoughtfully careful — of the kind of energy we perpetuate in the process.
Rather than continuing to fight what we feel is wrong "out there," what would happen if we accepted our feelings of pain and alienation as a commonality shared by all? Not as something that separates us — my pain versus your privilege, my outrage versus your indifference — but as the very thing that connects us? What if we acted from a sense of true communion that leaves no one and nothing apart?
This isn't naiveté. It's not wishful thinking. It's actually the most radical, most demanding, most courageous stance available to a human being: to refuse to dehumanize anyone, even those whose actions we find abhorrent. To hold the tension of opposing truths without collapsing into the comfort of certainty. To remain open when every instinct screams at us to close down.
A Practice for Right Now
Here's a little experiment you can try — either regarding something in your own life or something you're witnessing in the wider world:
Consciously challenge any belief you have that something or someone is wrong or threatening — and instead, include it as another aspect of yourself. The minute you notice feeling any judgment or alienation toward a person, experience, or thing, deliberately extend an attitude of inclusion and thoughtfulness.
I know. It sounds almost impossibly simple. And in a way, it is simple. But simple is not the same as easy.
What do you notice when you try this? What happens in your body? What happens to the tightness in your chest, the heat in your face, the clenching in your jaw? What happens to the story your mind has been telling you about who's right and who's wrong?
Most people, when they genuinely try this — when they move beyond the intellectual exercise and actually feel it in their bodies — report something remarkable. A softening. An opening. A sense of spaciousness where there was previously only constriction. Not because the situation has changed, but because their relationship to it has shifted.
And here's what's truly extraordinary: that shift in you doesn't stay contained within you. Energy is contagious — we know this from neuroscience, from the research on mirror neurons, from the simple lived experience of walking into a room where someone is radiating calm and feeling your own body begin to settle. When you shift your inner state, you shift the field around you. When you bring presence rather than reactivity to a difficult conversation, the other person's nervous system registers it, often without either of you being consciously aware of what's happening.
This is not metaphor. This is physiology. This is the way human beings are wired — to co-regulate, to attune, to influence one another's states of being through proximity and presence. Which means that every time you choose awareness over autopilot, every time you pause before reacting, every time you extend compassion where judgment would be easier, you are literally changing the neurochemistry of the people around you.
Seeding Common Ground
Consider this: when we stop resisting certain aspects of our experience as wrong, we open a field of personal and collective receptivity. We stop pouring our energy into maintaining walls and start redirecting it toward building bridges — not the performative kind, but the real, quiet, internal kind that begin with how we hold our own pain.
We become seeders of a truly common ground from which new life and possibilities can evolve. Not by ignoring what's broken, but by refusing to let our response to what's broken add more brokenness to the world.
I think about that woman in the grocery store often. Everything feels like it's falling apart. And I wish I could have turned to her and said what I'm saying to you now: Yes, some things are falling apart. And that's terrifying and painful and disorienting. But you — the quality of your attention, the warmth of your presence, the way you choose to hold your own suffering and the suffering of others — you are part of how it gets put back together.
Not through grand gestures. Not through righteous fury. But through the quiet, persistent, unglamorous work of tending to your own inner ecology. Of noticing when you've been hijacked by reactivity and gently, firmly, bringing yourself back to center. Of extending to yourself and to others the same grace you would offer a frightened child.
This is how the world transforms. One nervous system at a time. One moment of awareness at a time. One choice — to include rather than exclude, to soften rather than harden, to stay present rather than check out — at a time.
See the World as Yourself; Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as yourself; Then you can care for all things. — Tao te Ching, Chapter 13 (Stephen Mitchell translation)
With infinite love and support on your journey, Susan
