Settling

You cannot make mud settle and water become clear, you can only wait for it to do so.

“Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
until the right action arises by itself?”
Tao Te Ching, 15

I’ve always been fascinated by a certain mechanism that comes after sickness or extreme pain. You know this process, though perhaps you’ve never given it attention before.

You’re sick, and everything’s excruciating. You cannot breathe, or you have no energy. A fever is ravishing through your body, your throat is sore, your stomach revolting against anything you offer it. You cannot sleep, or you cannot do anything else but sleep.

You think it will never end.

Or something awful is happening to you, or to those around you. Everything is panic, crisis, fear and anxiety coursing through you, bleeding through your every expression. Those you care for cannot bear what is happening, their shoulders breaking just like yours.

It’s all too much, and you cannot imagine a moment when it won’t be.

But then it’s over, and what was the worst thing imaginable is suddenly an inaccessible memory, a ghost of a recollection. We can conjure to our minds what it felt like to be in pain, but we cannot actually recollect the pain itself. We remember the crisis was terrible, but nothing we do to hold its terror in our hearts again will ever suffice.

You know this process, though perhaps you doubt a bit what I say is true. If so, then try this. Try to remember the worst pain you’ve ever experienced, and try to inhabit that feeling again, to feel what you felt, how really horrifying it all was.

You cannot.

You can get close, of course. Much like delving into your most lush memories of sexual encounters: you might be able to feel aroused again, but you cannot actually replicate exactly what it was like. Or like the best meal of your life, or the most glorious day at the beach or in the forest — you can only feel what it was like to have had that experience, but you cannot feel the experience itself.

There are technical and psychological terms for this process, and also a few esoteric ones, but my favorite word for this process is settling.

Settling is a word that comes from two completely different roots which intertwined later. If you’ve read my essay, “A Plague of Gods,” you’ve already seen one such example: “property,” which derives from two different Latin words which came to be pronounced the same way in Middle French and thus merged.

Settling comes from two old words, one from Anglo Saxon (“Old English”) setl and the other one from old Norse satt (which later became sahtlen). The two words have different original meanings which work in a complementary way.

Setl was “a seat,” which the extra meaning of home or abode, and was used to describe both a place a person might sit but also the position a star, the moon, or a planet held in the night sky. Satt was also a noun, but it meant “reconciliation,” as in after an argument or war.

These two meanings carry over into our modern English usage of the word settle. The first of those meanings continues to refer to the act of sitting or being at rest, as in when we speak of settlers and settlements, or when we say that ‘my stomach has settled’ or ‘the cat settled down for an afternoon nap.’ The second meaning, from the old Norse, inhabits the word when we speak of a court settlement, or say “we need to settle this.”

This latter meaning has led to a rather negative connotation¹ that only arose in English during World War II. From that point, the word also began to be used to describe the act of accepting less than you want, as in “settling for a lower wage,” which is in fact a kind of opposite meaning of the core word,² which held various connotations of contentment.

Regardless, I think settling is the best word for the process I described earlier. One of the reasons for that lies in settling’s inverse, “unsettling.” Something is unsettling when it disturbs you, puts you out of a sense of ease, pulls you from a state of rest, or literally forces you from your seat.

Unsettling maintains one of the otherwise lost meanings of the Old English word setl, that of celestial bodies having a true “seat” somewhere in the sky. Earthquakes are unsettling specifically because the earth itself is unsettled. Major disasters (from Latin, “ill star”) are unsettling because the world and the heavens themselves seem to be shaken up. Unsettling things disturb us (again, Latin, meaning “disorder” or “agitate”).

All this points to a rather beautiful aspect of ancient Pagan cosmology that mirrors a core truth in Taoism. Before Christianity arrived, and even centuries into Christianity’s transformation of society around universalist creeds, Europe’s pagans believed that each celestial body had its own purpose by mere virtue of being where it was. That is, each star in the sky had a seat there, and that’s where it as “at home,” where it was most able to be itself and therefore why it was there.

What’s always fascinated me about this kind of cosmology is that there was never any need to posit a seating arrangement. That is, no one put the stars there or made places for them, because no one needed to tell the stars where they should be, what they should do, or even to tell them to exist. They just existed, they just were and are in an unquestioned and unquestionable act of being.

Incidentally, early Christianity didn’t immediately reject this pagan cosmology, and far into the medieval period we still see monks and priests treat the heavens not as a matter of design but instead as something that just was and is.

If you’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s series on The Machine, you’ll already have a sense of how this changed, and also the consequences of believing humans can order the natural world and each other. It wasn’t really until the Protestant Reformation (and the subsequent Age of Reason and the birth of capitalism) that we came to act as if the natural order of things should or even could be altered.

Where I’m sure Paul would disagree with me is that I see the core problem in the idea of a divine Designer. In monotheism, it is God which gives meaning to the world and all of creation by the very act of creating it. It is also God which gives order to the world by the very act of ordering it in the first place. Once you posit a singular intelligence and a singular order, a singular and universal code of design, then the only thing stopping humans from trying to do the same is their fear of retribution from that almighty. Now that humans don’t fear or even believe in that God any longer, there’s nothing stopping them from trying to take his place.

In this older Pagan cosmology, the goal of human life isn’t to unseat or dethrone the stars or the gods from their homes, but rather to learn how to also find our own seats and our own homes. Everything in nature is in its setl: the forest is where the forest is, the river is flowing through its home, the stars and the sun are following their own tracks across the sky just as the deer follow their own tracks across the land.

Everything is following a kind of order, but it is its own kind of order,³ an order arising from being rather than purpose. Purpose implies design, an ultimate destiny, what you were ‘put on this earth for.’ Being, on the other hand, is its own fulfillment, which is also the Tao of the Tao Te Ching.

Taoism is ultimately about finding the setl, the seat of yourself, your resting place from which true action can only arise. When I first read the Tao Te Ching, I was a young revolutionary anarchist, full of rage, fury, and desire to remake the world. I remember being really fucking angry when I read it, finding it obnoxiously smug and condescending:

“Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.”
Tao Te Ching, 29

Everything around me felt wrong. It all needed to be fixed, changed, revolutionised. All my life was a revolt against it all, the people in power, the injustice everywhere, the complete unrightness of life and society. I needed to act, and so did everyone else, otherwise we were all going to die.

I can smile at all this now, and I’m sure the me back then would find my smiling as odious as he did the words of that tiny book of Asian philosophy. I smile now because I’ve learned that nothing I could have possibly done back then would have accomplished what I thought was needed, and everything I did merely showed me what was not possible, rather than what was.

This idea of Being, just like the philosophy of the Tao, can seem to argue for complete inaction, for doing nothing ever. That’s how I first understood it when I saw it manifested in people I admired and also envied, older people whose serenity and calm felt like utter indifference to the world. I’d seen it also in people my own age and even younger, including in a close friend who would listen to my political rants while smiling and then suddenly give me a hug. It enraged me that he didn’t seem to care about the horrors of the world, yet now I see he was more in line with Being and the Tao then I ever could have understood. I was unsettled, and those sudden embraces settled me.

When I think on most of the political strife and rage, all the “sound and fury” of wokeness, I keep wishing someone would intervene and give them a hug. Not because they are necessarily wrong in their reactions to oppression, but rather because they are unsettled like I was. You cannot know how to act when you are unsettled, when you are out of yourself, when you are no longer being.

You cannot make mud settle and water become clear, you can only wait for it to do so.

This doesn’t mean no action should ever be taken, though. The point again is that “the right action arises by itself,” and that such action can only be known and made from a state of being, from the setl, the seat of yourself.

This is the reason why I think settling is also the best word to describe those moments after pain and crisis after which you can no longer remember how it hurt, only that it did. Everything was unsettled, and then it settled again, which is to say that we were unsettled, and then we settled. Acting during illness is a losing battle, as is trying to fight a storm of strife or chaos in our lives or in the lives of those around us. We often make it all worse, like when we try to keep up our daily activities despite having a flu: we only prolong the illness that way.

The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve learned that it is also possible to settle into unsettling times. I’m very rarely ill, a fortune that seems only to increase the more I settle into being body. On those rare moments when I do become sick, I actually get a bit excited, because it means I’m about to learn a new way to settle into myself.

I think gym work has particularly taught me this, especially the recent split-body training program I now use. The lower back and legs are so far removed from the western center of the body (the brain) that learning their immense power feels like receiving a massive inheritance from a relative you never knew existed. The hips are literally the setl of the body: they are how you settle into a seat, and also how you unsettle into standing.

This is what my face looks like after leg day.

The pain that comes from expanding these muscles is unsettling, yet that pain teaches you how to settle into it, just like illness and crisis points you always back to yourself and the body. If you’ve ever done heavy leg presses and rack squats, you’ll also know how this kind of work especially teaches you the beauty and wisdom of inaction (just try walking up stairs afterward…) and particularly the power of “correct” action.

There’s a natural way to bend that follows the body’s path, just like stars follow their own paths across the night sky and deer follow their tracks through a forest. Follow it and you become stronger, more yourself; follow paths the body does not desire and you’re likely to be injured.

Subtle and light actions are what actually cause deep change in the world, because they do not disturb being; rather, they arise out of being. The sun’s warmth and light emanate from and flow through its very act of being the sun, just as our warmth and light arises from the act of being in ourselves. This sounds like hippy crap or white light drivel perhaps, yet the longer I live the more I see there is no other beautiful way of being except this.

That requires settling. Not “settling for,” but rather settling into. Not mere contentment or false compromise, but instead a great patience and certainty that disturbed waters eventually become clear, storms inevitably pass, and great strife always finally burns itself out. In that moment of settling—and only at that moment—can we ever see the right action arising out of the true act of being.

1. For those new to etymology and the fantastic art of word meanings, here’s a key to get you started. A denotation is a word’s primary meaning, or how it is intended to mean. A connotation is what is considered a secondary meaning of a word. Think of it a bit like color: a denotation would be the primary color (blue, red, etc) and the connotation is the shade of that color (sky blue, midnight blue; blood red, magenta).

2. This same thing happens a lot now.

3. There’s a echo of this kind of thinking in Max Stirner’s political principle of Der Eigene, and in Nietzsche’s injuction to “become who you are.”