Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Living in the Present Moment - Life Wisdom #63

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Zhuangzi tells the story of a man who was so troubled by his own shadow, and by the sound of his own footsteps, that he decided to get away from them for good.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. Chuangzi tells the story of a man who was so troubled by his own shadow and by the sound of his own footsteps that he decided to get away from them for good. So he began to run, and the faster he ran, the more footsteps. he left behind him while his shadow kept pace at his side without the slightest effort. Convinced he was still too slow, he ran faster and faster, never once stopping to rest,

until at last his strength gave out and he fell dead on the road. Twangzi adds a single remark as though speaking to the man himself. Had he sat down in the shade of a tree, his shone, His shadow would have vanished and his footsteps with it. I have thought about that man many times, because most of us know something of his running, even if what we are trying to escape is a worry rather than a shadow. There is another story from the Zen tradition which answers the first one almost perfectly, and it concerns a student who asked his master what his

practice consisted of. The student expected to hear something difficult and secret, whereas the master only told him that when he was hungry, he ate, and when he was tired, he slept. The student protested that everybody does that, so the master explained that most people, while they eat, are thinking of a thousand other things, and while they sleep, dream of a thousand,

worries. This episode is about the distance between those two men, the one who runs and the one who eats, and about a conviction of mine. The present is almost always lighter than we fear. Our capacity to travel in time is one of the great gifts of being human, since it lets us learn from the past and prepare for what is coming. It is how a farmer knows to plant in spring for a harvest in autumn, and how a parent holds a child's whole future in mind while tying a pair of small shoes. The difficulty is that the mind seldom brings back only what is useful, since along with the information, it brings the fear, the felt weight of something that has not happened yet. So we end up carrying tomorrow,

in a today that has no room for it and no way of dealing with it, while the moment we are living in slips by unattended. This is why anxiety wears us down so thoroughly, because we seldom suffer a hard thing only once. We suffer it in advance, then when it happens, and often again in memory. Of all those rounds, only one ever took place in a moment where something could be done, which makes the others a kind of running with no

destination at all. Most of us know the night version of this when we wake around three in the morning and find that the mind has woken first and is already at work. It arrives with everything at once, whether the conversation you're dreading on Thursday, the money that was not stretch to the end of the month, or the results that are not back yet. All of it sits on your chest in the dark, with a weight that feels entirely real, as though each of those things were happening in the room at that very moment. And if you could step back and look at the room itself, you would see a person lying in a warm bed, a house asleep around them.

and nothing being asked of anyone. The Thursday conversation will last perhaps 20 minutes when it comes, while we may spend 20 hours on it beforehand, most of them at 3 in the morning, when nothing can be done. I would ask you not to be hard on yourself for this, because underneath all the rehearsing, there is usually an attempt, however clumsy, to protect you.

Somewhere we learned that worrying about a thing enough in advance would make us ready for it, or even keep it from happening, so the mind keeps using the only tool it knows. The trouble is that this rehearsal prepares us for very little, since the real Thursday rarely resembles any of the versions we imagined, and we arrive at it more tired than really. like the man on the road we take the running for effort and the effort for safety,

when in truth it is only producing more footsteps to be afraid of. It helps to separate two things the mind tends to fuse together, because once they are apart, a good deal of the weight falls away of its own accord. On one side is the situation you're not. you're in right now, where your body is, what is in front of you, and what is being asked of you in the next few seconds. On the other is the story of everything ahead, the long line of difficulties stretching into next week and next month, each imagined in detail, and all of them felt at once. When we say we cannot cope, it is the story we mean, and we are

right since nobody copes with a whole year at once and a year never arrives that way. It comes one day at a time and each day one hour at a time and each hour in moments that taken on their own are small enough for a person to get through. I should add one qualification because some moments are hard in themselves and we will come back to those later, since they deserve their own care. Think of a traveler walking a mountain path at night, with nothing but a small lantern held out in front of her, whose light reaches perhaps three or four steps ahead. She cannot see the valley she is heading toward, nor the turns of the path, nor what waits at the pass, whereas those three or four steps

are lit and clear. If she stops to peer into the dark, trying to make out the whole road, she sees nothing but shapes and imagines every one of them to be a danger. Yet the lantern has always been enough since it moves with her hand so that each time she takes a step,

the next step is lit before her foot arrives. Every night journey ever made on foot was made that way, and many of the important stretches of a life are walked in exactly that kind of darkness. The Tao Te Ching says something very close to this in its 63rd chapter, which is usually read as advice on how to accomplish great things. Lao Tzu writes that the difficult things of the world are always made of easy ones, and the great things of the world are always made of small ones.

He adds, almost in passing, that the wise person never takes on great things, and precisely for that reason is able to accomplish them. Nobody climbs a mountain if we look closely, because people only take steps, each about the length of a step, and the mountain is what those steps add up to. The person at the bottom who tries to take in the whole climb

is often too frightened to start, while the one who watches the next few meters only has to lift a foot. What reassures me most is that the size of what you face is never the size of what you have to do now, since this moment only has the size of a moment. On difficult days, there is a question that has helped me more than almost any other, and it is small enough to use in the middle of anything.

Can I get through the next ten seconds? The answer is almost always yes, and once through them you can ask again, so that one small yes at a time a minute passes, than an hour, than a day you thought unmanageable. people who have come through very hard things often describe discovering this on their own whether by a hospital bed

in the first weeks after a death or during a long recovery they say the only way through was to stop measuring how long it would last because nobody has to survive the whole year today only this hour sometimes only this breath

The question works because it is honest, since you may have no idea about the next six months, whereas about the next ten seconds, the truthful answer is yes, and that truth studies you. If even ten seconds feels too long, you can make the moment smaller still, until it is only the size of a single breath, coming in and going out. Nat Han offered a very plain sentence for this, to be said silently with the breath. Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out. It asks for nothing more than to notice what is already happening,

and the noticing itself repeated a few times is often enough to bring the whole of you back into the room. If the mind is where the future lives, the body is where the present lives, which makes it the most reliable way back when you have drifted far ahead. The body cannot travel in time, so while the mind is already in Thursday, it stays in the room sitting on this chair or lying in this bed, waiting to be noticed. You can return your attention to the weight of your body where it rests, to the floor under your feet,

and to the breath going in and out without any effort of yours. Not one of these sensations can hold a worry about next month, since they belong entirely to now, and attending to them brings you back to now along with them. You can also describe in plain words what is happening as though to someone who cannot see it. I'm lying in bed, the house is dark, and nothing needs doing until the alarm. It sounds almost too simple to matter, and yet it does something the mind cannot do on its own, which is to set the real situation beside the imagined one.

You'll find if you try this that the mind does not stay home for long since within a few breaths it will have set off again toward Thursday, as minds do. That is no failure and it helps to know this in advance because many people give up

at exactly this point convinced that they are hopeless at being present. The practice was never to stay in the present without leaving, which nobody manages, whereas it has always been the returning again and again as many times as it takes. Each return counts, and the hundredth is worth as much as the first, in the same way that a traveler who keeps glancing at the lantern keeps finding the path again. Over time, the returns grow a little easy,

and a little quicker, so that the mind begins to recognize the way home. Much as feet learn a path walked often enough. This is what Jungsi meant by sitting down in the shade. Since the moment you stop running and come to rest where you are, the shadow you were fleeing has nowhere left to follow. The Vietnamese monk, Tignhat Han, spent most of his life teaching. exactly this return, and he had a way of making it sound like the most natural thing in the world.

He liked to say that people usually think of walking on water as a miracle, whereas the real miracle is to walk on the green earth here in the present moment. When he taught walking, he asked people to take each step as though their foot were kissing the ground, with no destination in mind and nowhere to arrive except the step itself. It sounds almost childlike, and yet anyone who has tried it for five minutes knows how much the mind resists and how much lighter the body feels once the resistance gives way. In the community, he found it in the south of France. A bell would ring at intervals during the day, and when it did,

Everyone stopped whatever they were doing for three breaths. The person carrying a tray would stand still with the tray, and the person in mid-sentence would let the sentence wait until the three breaths were over and life resumed. Most of us live far from any monastery bell, but our days are full of sounds that could serve the same purpose if we decided to let them. The phone ringing, the kettle coming to the boil,

the traffic light turning red, the moment the laptop takes to wake up, each of these can become a small bell calling you home. Three breaths is all at us, and it costs nothing since you're waiting anyway, only this time you're waiting inside your own life. rather than somewhere ahead of it. The same running happens in daylight,

in less dramatic forms, when you're on a train or in a queue or at your desk on an ordinary afternoon. The body sits comfortably in the present, while the rest of you is somewhere uncomfortable in the future, going over an email not yet written or a problem weeks away. Without meaning to, you're suffering in a place where you're not,

while the moment you are in, which may be perfectly pleasant, goes by without you. Picture someone walking home on a mild autumn evening, under trees that are just turning, with the light going gold at the end of the street. Their mind, meanwhile, is in a meeting that will take place next Tuesday, arguing with a colleague who is not there about a decision that has not been made. They will reach their door with no memory of the trees or the light and a knot in the stomach from an argument that happened entirely inside their own head. There are moments though when the

difficulty is right here because the pain is in the body now, the grief is in the room now, or the bad news has already arrived. In those moments, I would never tell anyone that they need only be more present, as though presents were a trick for making pain disappear, because it is nothing of the kind. There is an old Zen parable that holds this with great honesty, and it tells of a man who was crossing a field

when a tiger began to chase him. He ran to the edge of a cliff and caught hold of a wild vine and hung there over the drop while the tiger paced above him, sniffing the air. Looking down, he saw a second tiger waiting at the bottom of the cliff, and then two mice, one white and one black, began to gnaw at the vine he was holding. Just then he noticed a wild strawberry growing

from the rock beside him. So he held the vine with one hand, picked the strawberry with the other, and ate it. And the parable ends with a single line, which says only how sweet it tasted. The tigers do not leave in that story, and the vine is still being gnawed, which is exactly why I trusted, since it makes no promise that the present will fix anything. It shows you. It shows that even the worst moment remains a moment, with its own taste and its own small offering, which the fear of what comes next cannot take from us. In hard times, something always holds, since the pain of this moment is one thing, while the fear that it will never end or grow worse is another, and usually the heavier. Returning to the present,

will not remove the first, although it can lift a great deal of the second, which is often most of what we are carrying. If this moment is more than you can hold alone, reaching for someone, whether a friend, a doctor, or a helpline, is itself an act of the present, and often the wisest one. This does not ask you to stop planning or to start planning. Or to start a caring about the future, nor to reach a permanent calm that nobody achieves anyway. The future matters, so the point is to visit it, to do something useful, such as booking the appointment or writing the email, and then to come home again. What wears us out is living there instead in a crowded, imagined tomorrow,

while the only moment in which anything can be done passes unnoticed. Much of what we dread will never happen, and what does will arrive in pieces, each met by the person you will be then, who will have had time to rest and gather themselves. When the present does ask something of you, it usually asks for something small, such as the next phone call,

the next sentence of the email, or the next step across the room. That small thing is always the right size for a person to do, and it is exactly what Lao Tzu meant by the easy things of which all difficult things are made. The master who ate when he ate was never only teaching how to get through hard moments, because his answer also points to everything we miss while we are elsewhere.

A meal eaten while thinking of a thousand things is a meal that has hardly been tasted, whereas the man on the cliff with tigers above and below tasted his strawberry completely. Thishnut Hun told a small story about this of eating a tangerine, with a friend who was talking about all the projects he had planned, one after another. The friend kept peeling segments and putting them into his mouth without noticing any of them, until Dick Nhat Han pointed out that he was not eating the tangerine at all. He was eating his projects, one segment after another, while the tangerine itself, its sweetness, and its smell and the cool of it on the tongue,

passed through him unnoticed. Most of us eat a good many tangerines that way, and live a good many afternoons that way too, which is a gentle reason to come back rather than a harsh one. When the mind comes home, even for a few seconds, ordinary things regain their color, so that a warm cup, a voice in the next, next room or light on a wall become present again. Presence, in that sense, is less a technique for

surviving than a way of arriving in your own life, which has been taking place here the whole time, one moment after another. So if you wake tonight or some night soon and find that your mind has gone running on ahead of you into all of it, try sitting down in the shade. feel the weight of your body in the bed and the warmth of the sheets and listen for whatever small sound the house is making around you tell yourself plainly what is happening and then ask the only question that matters at that hour which is whether you can get through the next 10 seconds you can because you always have every one of

of them all the way to hear and the next step of the path will be lit when your foot arrives.