Watch a tree grow this morning, if a tree happens to be nearby: no one is coaching it. It doesn't hold trainings on how to be a tree. Taoist thought names this quality ziran (say "dzuh-rahn"), often translated "naturalness" or "self-so," the way a thing simply is what it is without outside instruction. The word doesn't mean "nature" as in forests and rivers, it names a spontaneity that can belong to a person, a government, or the Tao itself. One old passage describes rulers so unobtrusive that people credited their own good fortune to themselves, not to the ruler. The trap is mistaking ziran for passivity: it produced results, it just didn't announce itself doing so. That gap, before you explain yourself to yourself, is where ziran lives. Today, before you manage or narrate your next reaction, catch the half second before the commentary starts.
Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.
Tao Te Ching, ch. 25 (trans. James Legge)