I found this quotation from Thomas Merton in a beautiful book by Lenedra J Carroll, The Architecture of All Abundance, which I bought from Cygnus Books:
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence… activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful.”
It seems to me to cast a lot of light on Hexagram 25, Without Entanglement – which LiSe once translated as ‘Not Succumbing’. The ancient kings of 25’s Image enjoyed fruitfulness without frenzied activism, ‘using the luxuriant growth of the season to nourish the ten thousand things.’ It’s an open secret of the hexagram that though we approach this state by disentangling, it emerges as a state of connection.