What is rooted is easy to nourish.
What is recent is easy to correct.
What is brittle is easy to break.
What is small is easy to scatter. 

Prevent trouble before it arises.
Put things in order before they exist.
The giant pine tree grows
from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet.

Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe.

Therefore the master takes action
by letting things take their course.
He remains as calm
at the end as at the beginning.
He has nothing,
thus has nothing to lose.
What he desires is non-desire;
what he learns is to unlearn.
He simply reminds people
of who they always have been.
He cares about nothing but the Tao.
Thus he can care for all things.

From The Tao Te Ching—The Canon of the Path and the Power:

In Tao the only motion is returning;

The only useful quality, weakness.

For though all creatures under heaven are the products of Being,

Being itself is the product of Not-being.

Even here, in the simplest and final distillation of Zen thought, we find that it all leads back to a woman.
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The Way and Its Power - Dao De Jing I. 6.

The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.

Where am I going with all this?

No idea.

I'm certain James Brown knew what he was getting at when he sang

It's a man's man's man's man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing
Without a woman or a girl

David Bowie once remarked that a Japanese Zen master had declared that the 12-step program, i.e., Alcoholics Anonymous, was the Tao of the West.  

Could be!

But even then, it would be the product of the Not-being. 

We can live with that. 

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