Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. — Alan Watts
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
Why might this line matter today, not tomorrow?
The Image of Muddy Water
Alan Watts frames the mind as a glass of water clouded by silt: the more it’s agitated, the less we can see through it. In everyday life, agitation looks like frantic problem-solving, compulsive overthinking, or repeatedly rehearsing what we should have said. The metaphor is deceptively simple, yet it points to a practical truth—clarity often isn’t manufactured; it’s uncovered. From this starting point, Watts invites us to notice that the impulse to “fix” our mental turbulence can be the very motion that keeps it turbulent. When we keep stirring the water to make it clear, we only suspend more sediment and prolong the murkiness.
Non-Action as a Form of Wisdom
Moving from metaphor to method, the quote echoes Taoist themes of wu wei, often translated as “non-doing” or effortless action. The Tao Te Ching (c. 4th century BC) repeatedly suggests that forcing outcomes can backfire, while allowing processes to unfold can restore balance. Watts, who often interpreted Eastern philosophy for Western audiences, uses “leaving it alone” as a corrective to our culturally trained compulsion to intervene. This doesn’t praise passivity in all circumstances; rather, it highlights timing and proportion. Sometimes the wisest action is to pause until the system—whether a mind, a conversation, or a decision—returns to equilibrium.
How Trying Harder Can Cloud the Mind
Once we accept non-action as meaningful, we can see how effort can become noise. Under stress, the brain narrows attention, and rumination multiplies possibilities without resolving them; the result is a thickening fog of competing interpretations. In that state, demanding immediate certainty often produces impulsive choices, not good ones. By contrast, “leaving it alone” creates the conditions for cognition to reorganize. Much like stepping back from a tangled knot, distance reduces tension and restores a clearer view of the structure of the problem—what matters, what doesn’t, and what can wait.
Stillness as a Practical Technique
With that in mind, Watts’ advice becomes a technique: stop stirring. This might look like taking a walk without podcasts, sitting quietly for five minutes, or sleeping on a decision—ordinary acts that allow emotional sediment to settle. Anecdotally, people often report that a hard email becomes easier to write the next morning, not because new information arrived, but because the internal water cleared. Importantly, stillness here isn’t escapism; it’s a deliberate interruption of unhelpful mental motion. The pause creates space for subtler signals—values, intuition, and perspective—to reappear once the surface stops churning.
When Letting Be Becomes Insight
As the water clears, insight tends to arrive less as a dramatic revelation and more as a quiet recognition: “Oh—that’s what’s really going on.” Watts frequently emphasized that reality is apprehended most directly when we stop trying to seize it. Zen traditions similarly caution against grasping; in The Platform Sutra (7th century), awakening is described as seeing one’s nature when delusion ceases, not when something new is added. In this light, clarity isn’t a trophy earned by force; it’s the natural transparency that returns when agitation ends. Leaving it alone is not doing nothing—it is allowing what is already true to become visible.
The Boundary: Letting Settle vs. Neglect
Finally, the quote gains balance when we distinguish between pausing and avoiding. Muddy water clears if left alone, but some real-world problems worsen if ignored—conflict that needs repair, health symptoms that need attention, injustice that demands action. Watts’ point applies most directly to the inner turbulence that distorts perception, especially at the outset of decision-making. A useful sequence, then, is: settle first, act second. By letting the mind clear before intervening, we choose responses rooted in reality rather than reactions fueled by stirred-up sediment. In that way, stillness becomes the beginning of effective action, not its opposite.