If You Can't Manage, Don't

There’s an old English legend about a king who was tired of his courtiers’ constant flattery. They thought he was so great that even the sea must obey him. So the king had his throne carried to the shore and, before their eyes, commanded the tide to stop. But the waves rose, as they always did. Then the king said, “Let all men know how worthless is the power of kings.” He hung up his crown, and never wore it again.

One moral of this story is that it’s exhausting to claim powers we don’t actually have. And yet, we do this all the time. We try to manage our thoughts, though we can’t make the mind be still on command. We try to manage other people’s feelings. We even try to manage “the planet”, as though we could bend the tides of history.

When we claim powers we lack, we lose the ones we do have. In his book Fierce Vulnerability, Kazu Haga calls this “the politics of exhaustion”: the way activist paradigms often create burnout by convincing people they should be able to control outcomes. Real resistance, he says, isn’t denying our powerlessness. It’s meeting powerlessness with presence. Only then can we find sustainable change.

The Buddha taught much the same. We give away our real power, he said, in three ways: (a) by fighting impermanence (anicca), (b) by denying the unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) of conditioned experience, and (c) by refusing to accept that our minds and bodies never fully obey us (anatta). When we struggle in this way, we think life is against us, when really, we’re against life as it is.

So look at where you’re struggling to manage right now, and ask whether you need to be the manager. There are other jobs, you know. You can be a student who turns experience into learning. You can be a warrior who gives up comfort for some higher purpose. You can be a priest who finds the sacred in every moment. Or you can simply be a worker who takes joy in knowing what can, and can’t, be done.