There is a term that connects East and West. Gelassenheit. You can translate it with serenity or calmness, but its historical significance, from the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart is “abandon”: let us rocking on the water, anchored to our center but always ready to set the sail.
Do not be the ship, be air and water, together. The German word lassen used by Heidegger, is just antithetical to Nietzsche “Wille zur Macht”, the will for power. This state of spirit is quite similar to the wu wei of Taoism, the in-action that keep us in harmony with the world. Being a premise of the “clear view” of the essence of things (to discover us in the world, and the world within us), the calmness must remove all colors and all shapes, in order to become all colors and all forms.
Especially today, as Heidegger warned decades ago, our consciousness can not keep up the speed of technology (things, the production, the power: think about how we are increasingly dependent by technology objects in our daily life). We must accept the objects in our life, but always ready to let ’em go, since they’re not real needs, they’re non-essential, they’re never absolute.
But calmness is even our daily surrender to the End, the acceptance of death as expiration is congenital to inhalation. It invites us to re-discover the pleasure and the light that resides in the smallest thing, that makes our “being in the world” a unique experience.
