🥣 Too Much on the Plate

I write about fasting. I write about 無為 — about doing less, letting go, aligning with the current instead of fighting it. And yet, here I am again: drowning under the weight of everything I said I was done with.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

My calendar is a battlefield. My to-do list reads like a small country’s five-year plan. Books half-written. Projects half-born. Websites, outlines, edits, translations, bots, emails — all demanding attention like starving mouths. And the more I feed them, the hungrier they get.

Somewhere along the way, “purpose” turned into “burden.” The sacred art of doing less collapsed under the very modern disease of doing everything.

It’s the same mistake people make with food: the body needs a little, but we stuff it until it groans. The mind is no different. We pile tasks, dreams, ambitions, and “just one more” ideas until the plate overflows — and then we wonder why nothing nourishes us anymore.

Today I’m admitting this: I have taken too much on. And no amount of clever planning or “hustle” will fix it. The only cure is subtraction.

Maybe the real 無為 isn’t about sitting in stillness. Maybe it’s about walking into the kitchen of my life and scraping half the plate into the compost — without guilt. Maybe fasting isn’t just for the body; maybe it’s for time, attention, and responsibility too.

I don’t know which projects I’ll cut yet. But I know this: the Dao does not flow through the overfed. It flows through the empty bowl.