Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - A Thank You Isn't Necessarily Gratitude - Daily Taoism #65 - Taoism

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

We are very good at giving thanks and surprisingly bad at feeling grateful, and that gap is worth sitting with, because we tend to assume that the words and the feeling are the same thing at two different volumes, when they turn out to be different kinds of thing altogether.More resources:Free resources, books and more on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://wordsoftaoism.com/⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠My Substack Blog:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taoismteachings.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music I use, as a playlist:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome back to Daily Wisdom. I am Chen Li, author of the blog Word of Taoism on Substack, and you're listening to my podcast. We are very good at giving thanks and surprisingly bad at feeling grateful. And that gap is worth sitting with, because we tend to assume that the words and the feeling are the same thing at two different volumes, when they turn out to be different kinds of thing altogether.

Somewhere along the way, we made gratitude into a duty, and the duty has slowly crowded out the feeling it was meant to serve. You can hear it in the way we speak to one another about it, in the sentences we often hear. Be grateful, count your blessings, or remember how lucky you are. and in the reminder that there are children somewhere who would give anything for what you have. All of it is true, and I would still like to ask you something else. Do you remember the last time you actually felt grateful, felt it in the chest,

that warm and slightly heavy sense of having been given something you could not have made for yourself and did not have coming? for a good many people that is a much harder search than it ought to be, and the answer when it comes tends to be far back. Weeks ago, or the hospital or the birth, or the year someone sat with you when things were bad. Genuine gratitude, the felt kind, turns out to be a rare event in a life that says,

thank you, 40 times a day. Think for a moment about how you learned to say thank you in the first place, because most of us did learn it and learned it thoroughly. If you grew up with adults who cared about manners, you were drilled in it for years and corrected every time you forgot, until eventually it became automatic and you stopped noticing that you were doing it at all. Now try to remember a single occasion on which anyone taught you the other half of that exchange, which is how to be on the receiving end of something.

The words were never the difficulty. What nobody showed us was the thing underneath them. How to let a kindness land. How to sit for a moment in the position of the person who needed help and got it. Most people search for that memory and come back with nothing at all. We were taught the vocabulary of thanks and never once shown the posture, and the two are genuinely different things. Thank you faces outward toward the other person,

and can be heard and checked and corrected by anyone standing nearby, receiving faces inward toward yourself and happens in silence where nobody can see whether you did it or not, which is exactly why it occurred to nobody to teach it. So when you deflect a compliment, you're not being falsely modest, and you are certainly not being ungrateful. You're doing the only move you were ever shown. Somebody gave you something, and you produce the words you had. been trained to produce and the words did their job, which is to close the moment politely so that everyone can move on. The part where you would have let it in was never on the curriculum.

That is worth some gentleness toward yourself, because you have been performing all this time a skill you were never given. I sometimes try to imagine what that lesson would have looked like. Had anyone thought to give it, and the picture that comes is of a child being handed something ordinary, a drawing from a friend, or a second helping,

or a hand resting on the shoulder after a hard day at school, and of the adult voice behind them saying something other than, what do you say? It would have said something like, wait, do not answer yet, That was for you. Let it be for you for a moment. And the child would have stood there a little awkwardly with a thing in their hands, and learned without any words for it, what it is to be given to.

Almost nobody had that. And I certainly did not, which is why we grew up carrying one half of an exchange, the half that can be seen and corrected from the outside. while improvising the other half in private for the rest of our lives, mostly by skipping it. The improvising has a small number of recognisable forms, and you will find your own among them. There is the person who, the moment they are helped, is already planning how to help back, so that the favour never has time to sit before it is being converted

into a debt and repaid. There is the person who answers every gift with you shouldn't have, which sounds like modesty and is really a polite way of handing the thing back across the table. And there is the person who, when told that they matter to someone, makes a joke. Because a joke is the fastest known exit from the receiving position. Each of these is entirely innocent, and all of them come from the same place,

which is that we were handed something and never shown where to put it, so we put it down again as quickly as we can. When the gift is too large to be deflected, when someone has done something for us that no joke can cover and no favor can balance, most of us reach for the last tool we have, which is guilt, and we tell ourselves that we should be more grateful.

that we do not deserve this, that we ought to feel it more than we do. That voice has the sound of conscience, and I've come to think it is something else entirely. It is the untought lesson trying to teach itself by force, the child who was never told that the drawing was theirs, still standing in the doorway years later, and still not sure it is allowed to keep. it. The first thing to say is that it is slower than a thank you. The words take under a second

and the feeling needs three or four, sometimes considerably more, and it needs them after the words rather than instead of them in the small silence that a thank you is usually designed to fill. If you close the moment at the ordinary speed, which is the speed, which is the speed, we were all trained to, the feeling simply never has the room it needs to arrive. And you walk away, having been given something and having felt nothing, which is the ordinary condition of a life that thanks people 40 times a day. When you do leave the room open, something happens in the body before it happens anywhere else. A part of the chest that had been embraced without you're ever noticing that it was braced. Let's go a little in a way that resembles the

moment of sitting down after standing too long. And then if you stay, there comes the warmth you described, heavy and slightly humbling, humbling in the old sense of that word, which has to do with being close to the ground. For a few seconds, you are smaller than what was given, and this proved to be a very good place to be, and simply one that we were taught, for reasons nobody quite chose to hurry out of. Look again at the moments you named earlier, the hospital and the birth, and the year someone sat with you, and notice what they have in common, which is that you could not hurry out of them. Life held you still in the receiving position for long enough, days or weeks rather than seconds. And the thing you had never been taught happened on its own, without any

effort of yours and without your becoming a different or better person. That is, I think, the most hopeful fact in this whole subject. The capacity was never missing, and it was never damaged, and it did not need to be built. It was there the entire time, waiting only. only for you to stop moving long enough for it to work. There is something underneath the untaught lesson, and I want to go there carefully, because it is tender ground, and because it is not true of everyone.

To let a kindness land is to admit, for the length of the feeling, that you needed it. And some of us learned very early that needing things did not go well, that the safest way to be in a room was to be the person who required nothing from anyone. If that was your beginning, then the reflex that deflects the compliment and rushes to repay the favour deserves a kinder name than bad habit. It is a small guard who has stood at the door for a very long time, keeping you safe from a danger that in most of the rooms you now walk into

passed a long while ago. I wouldn't ask you to dismiss that guard who did their job faithfully and probably kept you whole. I would only suggest that you're allowed now and then to tell them that this particular room is safe and to let your hands rest for a moment. If none of that is your own, story and you simply were never shown, then there is even less to be troubled by, because what we

are describing is a skill, and skills can be learned at any age, and this one is gentler than most, since there is nothing to do and only something to stop doing for a few seconds at a time. The place where all this costs us most lies far from the people we thank easily and forget at once. It lies with the people who have been giving to us steadily for years. Think of someone like that in your own life, a partner who makes the coffee every morning, a parent who still asks whether you have eaten,

a friend who remembers the date of the thing you dread, and sends a message the night before every year without ever being asked to. Then ask yourself honestly when you last felt given to by them. And for most of us, the answer is a long time ago. And it is not because we love them less than we love the person who holds the door. It is because they never miss. Their gift arrives on the same schedule as the daylight. and anything that arrives that reliably stops registering as a gift

and begins to register as the weather, as a fact about the world, rather than something a person chose to do for you again this morning. So reliability, which is the purest form love, takes over years, is also the thing that makes love invisible. And the people who give us the most are precisely, the ones we find it hardest to feel grateful to. There is a passage in the 51st chapter of the Tao Te Ching

that I have come to read as being about exactly this, although it never mentions gratitude and was not on its surface written about people at all. Lao Tzu is describing how the way relates to everything it brings into being. and he says that it gives them life without possessing them, that it acts on their behalf while expecting nothing in return, that it raises them without ruling over them. And he calls this the hidden virtue,

the goodness that does its work without asking to be noticed. If you read that as a description of the morning you woke into, it becomes very intimate very quickly, because something has been feeding you and warming you and keeping your heart going through every night of your life. And it has never once sent a bill and it does not require your thanks. And it will do the same again tomorrow,

whether or not you notice. Now set that beside the duty we began with, that be grateful and count your blessings. And notice what the duty assumes, which is that there is an account somewhere and that you are behind on it. The truth is that there is no account. The giving that surrounds you is not waiting for a response, and nobody is keeping score, and nobody ever was,

which means that gratitude was never a debt you have been failing to pay, but a warmth you have been walking past, something that does nothing whatever for the giver, and is good for exactly one person who is you. Once that is seen, the entire weight of should falls off the word, and what remains is something much closer to a pleasure you had forgotten was available than to a virtue you have been failing to practice. So let me suggest where to begin, and let it be small,

because this is not a project, and it would be a pity, to turn it into one. The next time someone pays you a compliment, say thank you, and then stop, without adding the word that usually follows and let their sentence stand in the air for three seconds longer than feels comfortable. Those three seconds will be uncomfortable,

and that discomfort is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is the sensation of being in the receiving position without an exit, which is exactly the thing we have spent our lives stepping out of. And it passes, and there is very often something warmer waiting underneath it. That is, the whole of the lesson nobody gave you. And it takes three seconds, and it can be practiced this afternoon.

It may help to know why so small a thing works at all. because three seconds hardly seems the sort of interval on which anything could turn. What those seconds do is interrupt a sequence that has been running unexamined since childhood, in which the gift and the thank you and the closing of the moment follow one another so fast that they have fused into a single gesture. And by holding the sequence open at the moment, the one point where it was designed to close, you give the feeling the only thing it ever needed, which was time and a little room and permission to be there. Nothing else is required of you, and in particular no effort to feel anything,

since the trying is itself a way of closing the moment early. When you're ready, try the same. thing with the person who makes the coffee. There is no speech to be made and nothing to announce. Only once, before you drink it, let the fact that it was made for you arrive all the way and stay with it for as long as it takes. You will not need to say anything, and they may notice anyway, because people can generally tell when something has landed. And when the all old voice comes, the one that says you should be more grateful, try meeting it with some kindness rather than obedience, because it is not your conscience speaking. It is the untought child,

still asking whether the drawing is really theirs, and you can tell them that it is and that it always was. I would like to end where you began, with the moments you could find when you searched because they hold the whole answer, and it is a gentler one than the duty ever offered. You did feel it that year when someone sat with you, and it did not come because you had become a better person, or because you tried harder to feel it. It came because for once you could not move, and the thing you were never taught had room at last to happen. It is still. It is still. still in you. It was never missing and it was never broken. It was only waiting all this time for you to stand still. Thank you for listening. Life wisdom is on Saturday. Until then,

when something kind comes your way, give it three seconds longer than you usually would.