Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Making Room For Yourself - Life Wisdom #58 - Taoism

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

Most of us have promised ourselves, at some point, that we would live more simply.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

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Your summer travels deserve an upgrade. With select Chevrolete, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles connected by OnStar,

you can stream, game, and more on the go. Whether you're headed to a music festival or a cottage getaway, you can access hundreds of apps on Google Play right from your center display. Explore OnStar Tech Today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. Most of us have promised ourselves at some point that we would live more simply. It usually arrives at the end of something.

We look at the shape of our life and think that there is too much in it and we resolve to change that. For a while we do. We give away a few bags. We say no to one or two things we would once have accepted. There is a lightness to it

and it lasts a month or two. then without any decision being made we find ourselves back where we started the shelves have filled the week has closed over nobody put it back it arrived one piece at a time each piece for a reason that made sense at the time

and the space we made disappeared without our watching it go I would like to spend some time on this today not on how to have less because there is no shortage of advice about that and much of it is good on something we discuss far less which is why it always comes back

the usual explanation is that we are disorganized that we lack discipline or the right system or the willpower to maintain what we started so we try again with a better method it works for a while then the fullness returns and we conclude that the failure was ours. I do not think that is what is happening.

Most of the people I have met who struggle with this are not undisciplined. They hold demanding jobs, raise children, keep promises. If discipline were the missing ingredient, they would have solved this years ago. What we tend to miss is that the things we accumulate are not lying around. by accident. They are doing work for us, and as long as the work is needed, more will keep arriving,

whatever we do to what is already there. Consider a bookshelf for a moment, because objects are the easiest place to see the pattern. On any bookshelf, there are books that have been read and loved read and loved and will be opened again. There are also books that have never been opened, and if we are honest, never will be. Most of us could walk over and identify them in under a minute. They are still there. They are still there because a bookshelf is not only storage. It is also a portrait of the person who lives in the house, and the unread books contribute to that portrait

as well as the read one, sometimes better, because they tend to be the more impressive titles. The part that surprised me when I first understood it is that we are not doing this for other people. Almost nobody looks inside our cupboards. Very few visitors examine the spines on the shelf. We are doing it for ourselves, and the audience is a part of us

that has never quite been convinced and that never delivers a final verdict, which is why the evidence has to keep accumulating. The same jury receives evidence in many other forms, and most of them are harder to see, because we do not think of them as clutter at all. A full calendar is evidence. When someone asks how we have been,

and we answer that things have been busy, there's often a small note of relief in the word, and sometimes something close to pride. Busy means needed. Busy means our hours have value, that people want them, that we matter enough to be in demand. A week with nothing in it says none of that,

which is why so few of us can look at one without discomfort. A wide circle is evidence. the contacts, the invitations, the acquaintances we keep warm without ever quite seeing. Some of these are real friendships and some are entries in a ledger, and the ledger is doing the same work the bookshelf does. None of this is foolish. All of it comes from the same reasonable wish to be a person of substance. It simply follows us out of the cupboard and into every,

corner of a life. There is a second thing our accumulations do, and it is tender rather than vain. Think about what an object claims. The tent says I am someone who camps. The guitar says, I am musical. The shelf of history book says, I read history in the evenings.

Each one makes a small statement in the present tense about who we permanently are. Then people change without announcing it, usually without noticing until much later. We stopped camping four years ago. We stopped playing in a way that mattered before that. The tent did not get the message, and so the tent is no longer really a tent. It is a claim we are still making that has stopped being true. The same is true of things that take up no space at all.

This is why letting go of certain things can carry a sadness far out of proportion. Someone clears out a box from an activity they loved and have not done in nine years. And finds themselves unexpectedly grieving, a little embarrassed about grieving over a box of gear. It is not the gear. It is the admission it forces. Letting it go means saying out loud that we are, are not that person any longer. And most of us have never said that to anyone, including ourselves. If you have felt that, be kind to yourself about it. It is not greed or attachment. It is a small

piece of mourning for a version of yourself you were fond of, and mourning takes the time it takes. A third thing explains the arriving rather than the keeping. And most conversations about clutter skip it. A great deal of what we take on was acquired for a person who does not exist yet. We buy the running shoes for the person who will run. The bread machine for the one who will bake on Sunday mornings. The language books for the person who will finally learn Italian. The beautiful notebook for the one who will keep a journal this time.

We do this with our commitments too, and there it costs more. We say yes to the course, the club, the volunteering, the ambitious project, on behalf of a future self who will have the energy for it. That person is always slightly better rested than we are and slightly more disciplined, and they never quite arrive. There is nothing foolish in any of this. Every one of those choices was an act of hope. We saw a better version of ourselves clearly enough to spend money or time on their behalf,

which is a kind of faith in our own capacity to become. But buying the shoes is easy and becoming the runner is slow. The object arrives long before the person does, and often instead of them. And then it waits. And every time we open the cupboard or look at the calendar, it reminds us of something we intended

and have not done. This is why a crowded life can be so tiring in a way that has nothing to do with effort. We are living among the unfinished intentions of years. Not one of them is a failure on its own. Together they make a quack. quiet accusation, and we walk past it several times a day without ever putting words to it. And then there is what we keep out of obligation, which is different again, the gift from someone

we love that we have never liked. The furniture inherited from a grandmother, too large for the room, impossible to pass on because of who it belonged to. The thing that still works perfect. and therefore cannot be discarded in good conscience. These are held in place by feelings that have nothing to do with the things themselves. Guilt mostly and loyalty and a reluctance to waste. All decent instincts, all capable of filling a life. I have no clean answer here, and I distrust advice that says to drop them without ceremony. What I would say is that a gift has done its work at the moment it was given.

The love was expressed and received then, and it does not live inside the object afterwards. And a commitment that has become an obligation may be honored better by being ended honestly than by being resented for another five years. Seeing that our accumulations are doing work, makes the failure of every method easier to understand and much less shameful. The methods all treat the surface, sort by category. Hold each item and ask whether it brings joy. One in, one out.

Declare an email bankruptcy, cancel the subscriptions, block out the calendar. These are sensible systems and many of them work beautifully for a season. But if a thing is doing a job, removing that thing does not end the job. The position stays open. The part of us that wanted evidence still wants evidence. The identity being held open is still being held open. And so the role gets filled again by other objects, other commitments, other reasonable and interesting things on a slightly slower schedule.

We did not fail at simplifying. We rearrange the surface of something that was never on the surface. There is a line in the Tao Te Ching that goes to the heart of this, and it is not about houses or possessions at all, which is perhaps why it reaches further than any method. In the 46th chapter, Lao Tzu writes that there is no greater misfortune than not knowing when you have enough. And in the 44th, he asks, which is worth more,

our possessions or ourselves, and observes that whoever accumulates greatly will suffer greatly for it. Enough is a word everyone agrees with in principle, and almost nobody can locate in practice. We nod at it and go on gathering, because the question our gathering is answered, has never been asked out loud, and an unasked question cannot be answered.

What makes the line useful is that Lao Tzu does not treat enough as a quantity. He treats it as a form of knowledge, knowing when you have enough, something you come to understand, rather than something achieved by owning or doing the correct number of things, which means it cannot be reached by subtraction alone. Someone can own very little and still not know what enough is, and their life will show it in other ways,

in how they spend their hours or measure their days against other peoples. And someone can own a great deal and carry real responsibilities, and know perfectly well what enough is, and you can feel that within a minute of meeting them. This is where a distinction becomes useful because it changes what we are aiming at. There is a difference between having less and having room. Less is a result.

It can be photographed, it can be shown to people and admired. It can be achieved on a Saturday. And like all achievements, it will need maintaining, which is exactly why the shelves in the diary fill back up within a month of being cleared. Room is a capacity. It cannot be photographed. Nobody visiting would remark on it, and it is worth nothing at all until something arrives that needs it. If our aim is to have less, an empty shelf or an empty evening is finished. It is a small trophy, and we will protect it for a while, and then fill it with better and more worthwhile things, and feel that we have

improved. If our aim is to have room, neither is finished. Both are available. They are capacity, waiting for a use they do not yet know about. The room we keep in the end is the room we have for other people. A friend calls on a Tuesday evening because something has gone badly wrong, and what they need is for someone to come over and sit with them for three hours. Whether we can do that has very little to do with how much we love them. It depends on whether that Tuesday evening had any room in it. A parent receives a diagnosis, and there are appointments and phone calls and a great deal of driving. Whether we can absorb that, depends on whether there was any slack in our lives before the phone rang.

A life packed to the edges cannot respond to anything. It can only continue. And when we find ourselves unable to help someone we love, most of us experience it as a personal failing, as though we had loved them insufficiently. It was structural. Good intentions do not create ours. and love has never been able to make space in a week that has none.

I find that both humbling and a relief. Humbling because wanting to help is not enough. A relief because the answer is not to become a better person. The answer is to leave a gap. None of this asks anyone to strip their life bare, and I wouldn't want it to sound colder than I mean it. Some things hold love and should stay. The letters, the photographs,

the ring that is worth nothing and means everything, the old friendship that has gone quiet but would come alive in an afternoon. Those are not what makes a life crowded. There is a way to tell one from the other and it has nothing to do with usefulness. Pick something up and ask who you are showing it to. Then look at next week in the calendar and ask the same question.

If the answer is nobody, if you keep it for what it holds and would keep it in a life where no one ever visited and there was no one left to impress, including yourself, then it is not evidence. it is yours and you can keep it without any guilt at all. If the answer is that some part of you is presenting it to a jury, then at least you know what it is doing there.

And knowing that, you can decide whether you still wish to pay the rent on it. Most people who ask this honestly find that the treasured things pass the test quickly. It is the impressive ones that become, complicated. I do not think the goal is an empty house or an empty diary, and a life-strip to nothing is often another argument being made by other means. The starkness becomes the new evidence, submitted to the same jury as everything else at considerably greater cost. The goal is that our things and our days stop working for us, that they stop standing in for a case we are making, and go back to being a tent, a coat, a Tuesday evening, an hour we spend as we choose,

because knowing what is enough was never about a number, and it was never really about our belongings. It is the moment we stop needing our rooms and our weeks to answer a question about us, and let them be rooms and weeks with our things and our people in them and some space left over for whatever comes next.