Brain Food #839: The law of reversed effort
On not forcing narratives, or forcing oneself
Thoughts of the day
There is a place between not trying at all and trying too hard, where effort becomes counterproductive. Alan Watts, in The Wisdom of Insecurity, described this as ‘the law of reversed effort’:
“I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it ‘the backwards law’. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float… Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure… contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.”
The examples are countless: when we try to force ourselves to sleep we end up facing a long and sleepless night, those who desperately pursue a potential partner are more likely to be rejected, those who constantly chase happiness are the ones least able to find it, and the most anxious are often the ones who wish to control events they can’t.
Watts echoes Daoism and the Wu-Wei, which is often interpreted as ‘doing nothing,’ though what it suggests is, in fact, spending one’s energy where the efforts will be aligned with one’s environment, to the extent that they will feel effortless. It is a form of going with the flow, of not trying to force things, and then maybe that is exactly when they will begin to happen. To not act in a way that goes against the current and direction of nature. Sometimes that nature can be our own.
The more the conscious self fights to stay afloat, the more the unconscious self is pushed beneath the surface:
“The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness — what has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what is what, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should. In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing.”
— Aldous Huxley
In The Faraway Nearby, a book that doesn’t attempt to be anything but itself in all its layers, a blend of memoir, poetry, and literary criticism, amongst other things, Rebecca Solnit weaves together different threads of her life into a story, while essentially narrating change. Sometimes, we need to be willing to change our story, because holding onto a single narrative is clinging to a past that never made it to the present:
“Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it.
Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear- -you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself.”
Narratives and stories, after all, are our own creations, and as Virginia Woolf wrote, and demonstrated in her own work, “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
How we tell the story, how we shed our light, is personal. There can be more than one narrative.
And perhaps this lack of stringent effort leads to a newfound freedom, the simplicity of being and doing without having to abide by a strict narrative or set of rules:
“If there is indeed something original about my novels, I think it springs from the principle of freedom. I had just turned 29 when, for no particular reason, I thought, ‘I feel like writing a novel!; I had never planned to be a writer and had never given serious thought to what sort of novel I should be writing, which meant that I was under no particular constraints. I just wanted to write something that reflected what I was feeling at the time. There was no need to feel self-conscious. In fact, writing was fun – it let me feel free and natural.”
— Haruki Murakami
In Abstract Expressionism, the canvas is a field of becoming. With no preconceived idea of what the result would be, the artists literally went with the flow, making the act of creation one of freedom and spontaneous personal expression.
