Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Not Everything Is Meant to Stay

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

I want to talk about the story we tell ourselves when something ends. And about the fact that almost all of us have only one story available, and it is a story about failure.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

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Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac. definition of luxury. Welcome to life wisdom. Imagine you're looking for something in an old box. Between the documents and the spare keys, you find a photograph of someone you saw almost every day

for three years. And you can hardly remember the last conversation you had with her. Sitting there on the floor, holding that photograph, what arrives is a small ache with an accusation folded inside it. You should have called, maybe. You let that go. If you have ever felt that, you know it does not last long. It passes in a few seconds,

you put the photograph back, and the afternoon carries on. But it leaves something behind. And that residue is what I would like to spend some time with today, because I do not think most of us have ever really looked at. I want to talk about the story we tell ourselves when something ends and about the fact that almost all of us have only one story available and it is a story about failure. Start with how much of a life this actually covers because we tend to think of endings as rare and dramatic and they are neither. There are the friendships that dissolve without an event.

without an event. Betrayal at least leaves you something to hold, a reason with edges to it. I mean the ordinary ones, where two people who genuinely loved each other's company simply stopped being in the same building, and the thing that held them turned out to have been partly the building. There are the groups. Six people welded together by a project for 18 months, who knew each other's moods and marriages and orders at the coffee place, who said constantly that they would keep this up afterwards. Then the project ended, and there was a leaving drink, and within four months it was a group chat, where somebody occasionally posts a photograph. There are the places, a city you lived in for

four years, whose bus routes you knew, whose particular light in October you can still summon. You will probably never live there again. Nothing went wrong there. It simply finished. There are the versions of your own life, the years when your house was full of small children and noise and exhaustion, and you were needed every minute of every day. That ended too, and there was no final evening. No last time announced as the last time. Somewhere in there was the last occasion you carried a sleeping child, from a car to a bed, and you did not know it was the last, because nobody ever does. And there are the smaller things that are somehow no less real. The Sunday lunches that stopped when someone died, the band you were in, the routine you love, the routine you love,

and cannot reconstruct now, though nothing prevents it. There is a particular category worth naming on its own, which is the endings that went by without being noticed at all. There was a last time you played a particular game with a friend, a last time you walked a certain route home, a last time a child asked you to read to them, and you read the book slightly too fast because there were dishes, waiting. None of these were marked. They passed as ordinary days, indistinguishable from the ones

before them, and only years later did it become clear that one of them had been the end of something. I find that hard to sit with, and I suspect you might too. But it is simply how endings mostly arrive. Very few things in a life announce their conclusion. And if we waited to be told, we would never know when to be grateful. What all of these share is the absence of an event. That is what makes them so hard to think about. We are equipped for endings that announce themselves. We have rituals for those and language and permission to be sad.

For the things that simply thin out and stop, we have nothing at all. and so we are left holding a photograph on the floor with a feeling we cannot name and assume by default is guilt. So we do the thing we always do with a feeling we cannot name. We explain it. And the explanation almost always takes the same shape, which is that somebody was at fault, and after a brief search, the somebody is us.

I should have called. I am bad at keeping in touch. I let a good thing go because I was busy and careless and did not pay attention. Notice how confident that story is and how little evidence it actually rests on. It rests on one fact only. The thing is no longer here. And from that single fact, we reason backwards to a failure of character, as though the natural natural. condition of every good thing is permanence, and any deviation must therefore have a culprit. Listen to how we speak about it. A relationship that lasted 11 years and then ended is described as a relationship that failed. 11 years. Two people who found each other and changed each other and got each other through several of the hardest things that happened to anyone. And the word we reach for is failed. Meanwhile, a marriage in which two people have been miserable and rigid and unkind to each other for 35 years is described without irony as having worked. I do not think that is what is happening in most of these cases.

I have watched people conduct long trials against themselves over friendships that ended for the plainest possible reasons, that one of them moved to a different city and had a baby, and the other changed careers and the 11 hours a week they used to share were reassigned by life to other purposes without anyone being consulted. There was no failure of loyalty. there was a change of circumstance and the friendship had been made partly of those circumstances as almost all friendships are.

We conduct these trials in private and we lose them every time because we are the only one presenting evidence and nobody who loves you is in the room to say the obvious thing which is that you were living a life and lives take people in different directions, and that has never once been a crime. It is worth asking why we reach for our own

guilt so readily when there are so many gentler explanations available. I think it is because fault is, in an odd way, comforting. If the friendship ended because I did not call, then the ending was in my hands. It was preventable, which means the world is a place. where good things stay when you look after them properly, and where you are in control of what remains in your life. That is a frightening thing to give up. The alternative is harder to sit with. That things can end while everyone involved behaves perfectly well.

That circumstance is stronger than intention, and that no amount of care would have kept that particular thing going. we would rather be guilty than powerless. So we take the blame, because the blame comes with an illusion attached, and the illusion is that next time we could do better. The reason we reach for that story so automatically is that there is a measure underneath it,

and the measure is so widely shared that it rarely comes up for examination. We use duration as the measure, as the measure of value. You can hear it everywhere once you listen for it. They were together for 40 years, we say, and the sentence is already an admiration, and the admiration is attached to the 40.

We have been friends since we were nine, people say, and there is a small pride in it, as though the years themselves were the achievement. None of these are bad things. But notice what has happened. Length has become the proof of worth, which means anything that stops is automatically demoted, and the only fully successful version of anything

is one that outlives you. Apply that standard anywhere else, and it falls apart at once. We understand it about, seasons. Nobody stands in the garden in November grieving that the summer failed. The summer did not fail. Summers end. That is a property of summers, not a defect in any particular one. And yet with the parts of our lives that matter most, we hold the opposite standard without ever inspecting it and then convict ourselves under it. I want to be fair to the measure though because it did not come from nowhere

and it is not always wrong some things genuinely are meant to last and their value really does lie partly in their endurance a promise you keep for 30 years is worth more than one you keep for a fortnight because keeping it was the whole point a parent does not get to conclude that their obligation to a child was complete when the child turned 11.

Some commitments are defined by their duration, and to walk away from those is a real failure, and calling it completion would be a lie. So the measure is not false. It has simply been generalized far past the cases it fits. We took a standard that belongs to vows and obligations and applied it to everything, including the connections that were never promises in the first place.

Your colleague from three years ago never swore anything to you. Neither did you. What you had was real, and it was not a contract, and judging it by the standards of a contract is what produces the guilt. There's another reason a thing can stop, and we hardly ever consider it. It can actually be finished, complete, the way a season is complete.

It did the work it was there to do, and then that work was done, and the ending belonged to it as surely as the beginning did. The ninth chapter of the Tao Te Ching begins with two images you can verify in your own kitchen. fill a bowl to the very brim, Lao Tzu says, and carrying it will spill it. Keep sharpening a blade past a certain point, and the edge will not hold. I like these because they are so unmystical.

Both are ordinary observations about the physical world, and both make the same point. There is a right amount, and past it the extra effort does not add to the thing. it takes from it. The overfilled bowl is not more of a full bowl. It is a spill waiting to happen. The chapter ends with a line I want us to keep. When the work is done, withdraw. This is the way of heaven.

Sit with that phrase when the work is done because it assumes something we have stopped assuming. It assumes that work can be done. that things have a completion, a point at which they have arrived at what they were, and that continuing past it becomes a kind of misunderstanding, however much it feels from the inside, like loyalty. It also refuses the sentimental version, which is worth noting. It does not say that everything ends for a reason,

or that some larger plan required your friendship to dissolve. Nothing so grand. It says only that things have their own duration, the way a bowl has its own capacity, and that recognizing the shape of a thing is more useful than resenting it. And the word withdraw is doing something precise. Walking out and giving up both happen before the work is done.

Withdrawing is what comes afterwards. It assumes the thing was carried all the way to its own end and describes what comes next, which is the releasing of your grip on something that has arrived. That is a very different act from abandonment, and the difference is entirely one of timing. The same gesture performed too early is desertion. Performed at the right moment, it is completion.

Which means the question is never whether to hold on or let go in general, but only whether this particular thing has finished. The second passage is harder to hear, and I want to tell it carefully, because it is usually told badly. When Zhuanzi's wife died, his friend Huizi came to offer condolences, He found Zhuanzi sitting on the floor with his legs sprawled out,

drumming on an upturned tub and singing. Wheezy was appalled. He said more or less, this woman lived with you, raised your children, grew old with you. Not weeping would be bad enough, but drumming and singing. Twangzi said, when she first died, do you think I was any different from anyone else? Of course I grieved.

Of course I wept. He grieved first. He wept like anybody would. The singing came later and only later, and it did not replace the grief. It followed it. Then he describes what he did after. He looked back past her death,

past her life to before she was born. to before she had a body. And he saw the whole thing as a series of changes, one following another, like the turn from spring to summer to autumn to winter. Another change had now taken place, and she had died. And to stand over that howling, he said, would be to understand nothing about how things go.

I find the story extraordinary, and not because of the drumming, because of the order, grief first and understanding afterwards, and never one instead of the other. That order matters enormously because the philosophy we are circling today is easily turned into a weapon against yourself. If you take the idea that things are meant to end and use it to skip the sadness, You have not understood anything. You have only found a sophisticated way to avoid feeling something.

The photograph in the box is allowed to hurt. It should hurt a little. That is what the three years were worth. What Drungzi offers comes after mourning. Never instead of it. It is what becomes available on the far side of grief, which is the ability to look at a complete, pleaded thing and see its shape as well as its absence. I want to be careful here,

because everything I have said so far could be used dishonestly, and I would not want to hand anyone a beautiful excuse. Some things do not end because they were finished. Some things end because somebody was careless, or cowardly, or unkind, or too proud to make a phone call. call that would have taken four minutes. That happens. It happens to all of us. And telling yourself that a friendship you dropped through pure neglect was simply complete. Is not wisdom. It is a way of getting out of an apology. So we need to tell the two apart. And I think there is a workable test. Ask yourself, is there something I would do differently? that I could still do today, something available today, this week.

What you would have done differently in 2019 is behind a closed door, and there is no handle on your side of it. So, is there a message you could send this afternoon, a call you could make this evening, an apology that is still owed and still possible? If the answer is yes, then the thing is only dormant, and somewhere you know it, and the ache you feel is a task you have been avoiding

wearing the costume of grief. That ache is useful. It is telling you something actionable, and the response to it is not philosophy. It is your phone. But if the answer is honestly no, if you turn it over and there's nothing you could do today that would change anything,

because the circumstances that held it are simply gone, and both of you have moved into different lives, then the thing was not a failure. It was complete. And the trial you have been running against yourself has no case in it at all. Most people, us this honestly, find that the great majority of their endings

fall on the second side, and a few fall on the first, and those few are worth acting on this week. The test works because it moves the question out of memory and into the present, where you can actually do something. Guilt about the past has no exit. There is no action available in 2019. But if the thing is genuinely still open,

then it is not a memory at all. It is an item. and items can be dealt with in an afternoon. I would add one caution to it. Do not confuse could with wood. There are people you could message today and will not, because the friendship really has run its course and reaching out would be performing a connection

rather than having one. The test is not asking what is technically possible. It is asking whether something in you actually wants to. There's a second distinction underneath that one, and it is the more important of the two. Finished and broken are not the same thing, and we have only one word for both. Broken means it was going somewhere, and something stopped it.

There is a violence in it, and often a wrong. and something that would have continued has been prevented. Finished means it arrived. It went as far as it went, and then it had gone that far, and there was no further for it to go. Nothing was prevented. Nothing was taken from you.

Almost everything we call broken, when we look at it closely, turns out to have been finished, and the difference between those two words applied to the same three years and the same photograph, is the difference between carrying a loss and carrying a gift. It is worth saying what the other approach costs, because holding on past the end is never free,

and the cost is usually paid by the very thing you're trying to protect. Think of a job held three years past its natural end. and how those three years feel in retrospect compared to the good years before them. Think of a version of yourself you keep performing long after you stop being that person, because announcing the change feels like an admission. There's also a cost to the other person, which we rarely consider because we are so busy examining our own conduct. someone who senses that they are being seen out of duty rather than gladness

feels it even when nothing is said. To be an obligation in somebody's calendar is not a warm thing to be and often the kinder act is to let a finished thing be finished rather than to keep the other person in a role they have also outgrown. And there is a particular exhaustion in holding a moment. a completed thing open. It takes energy to maintain something that no longer maintains itself

and that energy is not available for whatever might be arriving next. The bowl filled past the brim cannot be carried anywhere. That last point matters more than it sounds. A life has a limited number of hours in it and the hours spent maintaining the appearance of finished things

are hours not spent on the ones that are currently alive. Most of us are not short of love or willingness. We are short of room. And a good deal of that room is taken up by things that ended some time ago and have never been allowed to. Let us go back to the box

and the photograph, because there is another, other way that moment can go. The picture is the same. The restaurant, the year, the face second from the left. The three years happened exactly as they happened, and they are exactly as over. The only difference is what you do in the eight seconds after you recognize her. You do not open the trial. You do not go looking for the moment you should have called. Instead, you let yourself notice what those three years actually were. A period in your life when you were not alone at lunchtime,

when someone knew the small daily details nobody else knew, when you had an ally in a building where you needed one. That was not a failed friendship. That was a friendship that did its work. And it may still be sad, and it is allowed to be. The sadness and the gratitude are not competing. They are the same feeling looked at from two sides.

What has gone is the accusation, which was the only part of it that was never true. There is one more thing this applies to, and it may be the most useful of all. It also applies to you. If you can look at that and see completion rather than lost, then you can extend the same generosity to almost everything that has left you.

And, more importantly, to the things that are still here and will not always be, which is all of them. That is not a reason to hold them tighter. It is a reason to be here for them now while they are still going on. So here is something to try this week. Think of one thing that ended, the kind that left a small accusation behind. Run the test on it honestly. Ask whether there is anything you would do differently that you could still do today.