There's an old story about how the Tao Te Ching came to be written.
The historian Sima Qian tells it, centuries after the fact. An old man, a keeper of archives, decided to leave. He travelled west, and at the pass the gatekeeper asked him not to go without leaving something behind. So the old man wrote a short book, and then went on, and was never seen again.
Nobody knows whether it happened like that, or whether there was one author at all. The story is tradition, not history. But I've always loved it, because of what the man leaves behind. Not a fortune. Not a system. A short book about how much can be let go.
What does Lao Tzu teach about letting go?
The Tao Te Ching teaches that the learner adds something every day, while the one who follows the Way lets something go every day, until almost nothing is forced. Letting go isn't loss or defeat. It's a return to what is simple and whole, the way water returns to the lowest place and wears down stone.
One line in chapter 48, in James Legge's 1891 translation, says it plainly: "He who devotes himself to learning (seeks) from day to day to increase (his knowledge); he who devotes himself to the Tâo (seeks) from day to day to diminish (his doing)."
Two directions. One adds. One takes away.
Why do we find it so hard to let go?
Because almost everything around us runs in the first direction.
Most of our lives are organised around adding. More skills, more achievements, more possessions, more information, more versions of ourselves to become. It's the direction of the whole self-improvement world, and it's the direction most of us were raised in. Getting better means getting more.
So letting go feels like going backwards. It feels like loss, or failure, or giving up. When someone suggests you might need less rather than more, a part of you tightens, because you've learned that what you hold is what keeps you safe.
But look at what Lao Tzu is pointing at. The learner increases, and the follower of the Way decreases, and it's the second who ends up closer to what's real. The cup is useful because of its emptiness. A room is useful because of the space inside the walls. What's absent does as much work as what's present. That's the old book's quiet argument for letting go, and it runs against almost everything we're taught.
What does water have to do with it?
Everything, in this book.
Chapter 78 begins, in Legge's words: "There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it". Water doesn't push. It doesn't argue with the rock. It simply keeps moving, keeps yielding, keeps finding the lowest place, and over time the hardest stone gives way.
I think about that image often in my own work, because it describes something people rarely expect. The patterns that feel most solid in us, the ones we've fought for years with force, discipline and effort, often don't give way to more force. They give way to something softer: attention, release, the removal of what's been holding them in place. When the charge underneath a pattern is taken out, the pattern stops resisting, the way stone eventually stops resisting water.
Can something that feels solid really soften that fast?
In my experience, sometimes astonishingly fast.
One case from our stories page I think of often: a teenager in severe depression and withdrawal who came through to full recovery in a single session. That's the outcome as the people involved reported it, and anyone in clinical care should keep working with their professional. I mention it here not as proof of anything Lao Tzu said, but because it shows what I mean by softness overcoming the hard. Nothing was added to that young person. Something was released.
That's the pattern his old book points at, put in the language I use myself. The freedom is in the removal.
How can I practise letting go in an ordinary day?
Try this with an actual cup. It sounds simple, and it's surprisingly effective.
Take an empty glass or mug and set it in front of you. Look at it for a moment. Notice that what makes it useful is the space inside. A cup that's already full can't receive anything.
Now think of one thing you're carrying that you'd like to put down. A grudge. A worry about next week. An old story about yourself. Name it in a sentence, out loud if you can.
Then pick the cup up, hold it for a few seconds as if that thing were inside it, and set it down on the table, slowly, as a physical act. Let your hands open afterwards.
This isn't magic, and it won't remove anything deep on its own. What it does is give your body a felt sense of the direction you're choosing: not adding a new coping strategy, but setting something down. Many people are surprised at how much their shoulders drop when they do it. Keep the cup on your desk for a week, and let it remind you which way you're going.
Is letting go the same as giving up?
It's an important question, because the two can look alike from the outside.
Giving up is collapse. It's what happens when you've been holding on so hard for so long that you simply can't anymore, and everything drops at once, usually with a sense of defeat. There's no freedom in it. Just exhaustion.
Letting go, in the sense the old book points to, is a release you choose. You notice that you've been gripping something that was never yours to carry: an old grievance, a fixed idea of how things should be, a version of yourself built to please or protect. And you open your hand.
The difference shows in what comes afterwards. After giving up, people feel smaller. After letting go, they usually feel lighter, and often more energetic, because they're no longer spending their strength on the grip. Water doesn't give up when it goes around the rock. It just stops fighting, and keeps moving.
If what you're carrying is something from the past, how to let go of the past goes further into how that release actually happens.
What's left when you keep letting go?
Not emptiness. Space.
People are often afraid that if they let go of enough, there'll be nothing left of them. The old book suggests the opposite: that what remains when the unnecessary falls away is simpler, freer and more fully alive. You don't become less. You become less crowded.
That's what I've seen, over and over, in people who let go of what they were carrying. They don't turn into blank slates. They turn into themselves, with room to breathe. It's also why so much self-improvement leaves people tired: it's all learning and increasing, and very little diminishing.
You might keep one question from this old book in your pocket this week: what's one thing I could carry less of, rather than one thing I could add? And if you'd like a place to start that isn't another thing to learn, the masterclass I made, Who Am I?, is built to help you set things down rather than pick more up.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.