Assert non-assertion. Practise non-practice. Taste non-taste. Make great the small. Make much the little. Requite hatred with goodness.
Contemplate a difficulty when it is easy. Manage a great thing when it is small. The world's most difficult undertakings necessarily originate while easy, and the world's greatest undertakings necessarily originate while small.
Therefore the holy man to the end does not venture to play the great, and thus he can accomplish his greatness. As one who lightly promises rarely keeps his word, so he to whom many things are easy will necessarily encounter many difficulties. Therefore, the holy man regards everything as difficult, and thus to the end encounters no difficulties.
Translation: Paul Carus, 1898 (public domain)
Sit With This
Which difficulty in your life today was once easy — and what is still easy right now that is quietly growing toward difficult?
A Practice
Pick the postponed thing you have been dreading because of its size. Find its small version — the first sentence, the single call, the five-minute start — and do only that today. Then notice the size of what remains, tomorrow, when you return.
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Western Commentary
The verse opens with the most compressed instruction in the book — act, but without forcing; and then, in case wu wei was starting to sound like a license to do nothing, it immediately turns practical. See the great in the small, it says; meet the difficult while it is still easy. Everything hard in this world, the verse observes, was easy at some earlier point; everything great was once small. And so the sage accomplishes the greatest things precisely by never venturing to play the great — because by the time a thing has grown great enough to impress anyone, the part that decided everything has usually already happened.
It is worth being honest about why this is hard, because the reasons live close to home. There is a part of all of us that postpones — that lets the two-line reply age into a difficult letter, the small ache into an avoided appointment, the minor misunderstanding into a silence neither side knows how to break. And there is another part, stranger, that is almost drawn to the drama of the rescue: the all-nighter, the heroic intervention, the crisis met magnificently — applause the quiet act of prevention never gets. Nobody thanks you for the difficulty that never arrived. The verse only asks you to notice that the easy version of every hard thing in your life once sat in front of you, small and unimpressive, asking five minutes.
The practice, then, is a kind of reverence for the small stage of things. Answer the message while it is two sentences. Have the conversation while it is one observation, not a year of grievance. Keep the promise made lightly — and notice the verse's quiet warning there: promises given too easily are the ones most often broken, and a person for whom everything comes easy is heading for a pile of difficulty. The sage's method reads like a paradox and works like arithmetic: treat even the easy as worthy of difficulty's respect, and difficulty stops appearing. Most of what we call great difficulty is just the easy, left to compound.
And the clause at the start that seems to belong to another chapter — requite hatred with goodness — sits exactly where it should. Resentment is the difficult thing that begins easiest of all; met while it is small, with something kinder than itself, it never grows into the feud, the rupture, the decade of cold. The verse is one teaching in five disguises: meet everything early, while it is still light enough to lift. The greatest things you will ever do will almost certainly not feel great while you are doing them. They will feel small. That is how you can tell you caught them in time.