Wu Wei

When I found the definition of wu wei on wikipedia, I saw that the concept has many different interpretations and is translated as "non-action", "natural action", "effortless doing", "action that does not involve struggle or excessive effort", "creative quietude", "art of letting-be", "active non-action"…

I am most familiar with it from annotations to Tao Te Ching by Derek Lin. He put it into words better that I could, so I will quote him:

"Unattached action is my translation of wu wei, the state where we act without attachments to specific outcomes. <…>
"The principle of wu wei is very powerful. By focusing on the process instead of the end result, we allow all things to progress naturally and minimize our tendency to meddle. "The net effect is that the difficult becomes easy, and we struggle less but accomplish more. <…>
"Those who do not understand wu wei may expend excessive resources, time and energy towards achieving their goals, but end up with poor results. This is because they insist on asserting their manipulative influence, which makes everything more complex and therefore difficult to manage. They are so eager to achieve that they trip over themselves."

Below is what I got from http://www.jadedragon.com/archives/june98/tao.html

"The essential message of Taoism is that life constitutes an organic, interconnected whole which undergoes constant transformation.
"Wu-wei refers to behavior that arises from a sense of oneself as connected to others and to one's environment. It is not motivated by a sense of separateness. It is action that is spontaneous and effortless. At the same time it is not to be considered inertia, laziness, or mere passivity. Rather, it is the experience of going with the grain or swimming with the current.
"we must be quiet and watchful, learning to listen to both our own inner voices and to the voices of our environment in a non-interfering, receptive manner. In this way we also learn to rely on more than just our intellect and logical mind to gather and assess information. We develop and trust our intuition as our direct connection to the Tao. We heed the intelligence of our whole body, not only our brain. And we learn through our own experience. All of this allows us to respond readily to the needs of the environment, which of course includes ourselves.
"Wu-wei also implies action that is spontaneous, natural, and effortless. As with the Tao, this behavior simply flows through us because it is the right action, appropriate to its time and place, and serving the purpose of greater harmony and balance. Chuang Tzu refers to this type of being in the world as flowing, or more poetically (and provocatively), as "purposeless wandering!" How opposite this concept is to some of our most cherished cultural values. To have no purpose is unthinkable and even frightening, certainly anti-social and perhaps pathological in the context of modern day living. And yet it would be difficult to maintain that our current values have promoted harmony and balance, either environmentally or on an individual level.To allow oneself to "wander without purpose" can be frightening because it challenges some of our most basic assumptions about life, about who we are as humans, and about our role in the world. From a Taoist point of view it is our cherished beliefs - that we exist as separate beings, that we can exercise willful control over all situations, and that our role is to conquer our environment - that lead to a state of disharmony and imbalance. Yet, "the Tao nourishes everything," Lao Tzu writes. If we can learn to follow the Tao, practicing non-action," then nothing remains undone. This means trusting our own bodies, our thoughts and emotions, and also believing that the environment will provide support and guidance. Thus the need to develop watchfulness and quietness of mind."