Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Staying Grounded when Everything Changes - Taoism

Episode Date: July 18, 2026

Beneath the ten thousand changing things, it says, there is a stillness that does not change. All things rise and flourish, each in its own season, and each in its own time returns to the place it came from.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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Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Welcome to life wisdom. We are wonderfully good at spotting change in other things. We meet a friend after some years and register in half a second

the grey that was not there before, the new lines around the eyes, the way the face has settled. We go back to a town we loved and find the old bakery gone and a bright new one in its place. We are precise instruments for measuring how the world moves around us. And the reason we are so good at it is quietly. revealing. To measure a moving thing, you have to imagine yourself standing still. You picture yourself on firm, unmoving ground, letting the world go past, marking what is different. But your

own feet were never planted on unmoving ground. And that turns out to be the best news of all. The body that walked back into that childhood room had cheerfully replaced almost the whole of itself since it last stood there. The skin, the blood, so much of what you are physically made from, quietly renewed while you were busy living, you're not a monument slowly weathering. You're a fountain forever being refilled.

The opinions you would once have defended until midnight. You have set down so lightly that you can barely remember holding them and you are freer for having set them down. The person you were once certain you could never become, you may already have been for years and being them suits you.

The child who found that little room enormous did not vanish in any sad way. That child simply kept living, one bright ordinary day after another, learning and losing and laughing and growing, until the living had carried it all the way here to you. This is the change we find hardest to see, only because we are looking out through it.

It is the very lens held to our eye, and a lens will not hold still to be admired. We see everything except the marvelous thing we are seeing with. Now it is true that when we first catch a real glimpse of this, when it dawns on us that we ourselves might be the most changeable thing in the entire room, there can be a flicker of fear. If even I am moving, then what am I supposed to hold on to? A teacher of our own time gave that flicker a name. Groundlessness.

And rather than treat it as a catastrophe, she does something surprising. She calls it the doorway to freedom because the ground we are always scrambling to rebuild beneath our feet was never really holding us up in the first place. What holds us up is steadier than any floor and we will come to it.

For now it is enough to say that the floor we are so afraid of losing is a floor we can happily do without. Because look what the changing actually makes possible. If everything changes, then nothing is ever finished. And this is a mercy so large that we walk past it every single day without seeing it. The mood that feels tonight as though it will last forever, will lift by morning, because moods change.

The version of you that feels stuck in place is already loosening, already on its quiet way to becoming someone with more room in them because that is simply what a self does when you're not looking. A wound can close over only because flesh is a changing thing. A grief can soften

only because the heart never stops moving. A friendship can deepen. A clumsy beginner can turn into a quiet master. A frightened person can grow into a braver one and every bit of it happens for a single reason. None of us is fixed. A child could never learn to walk in a world that held perfectly still,

and no one who has ever turned their life around did it by staying exactly the same. Impermanence is no thief come to empty your hands. It is the open road, and it runs in the direction of everything you have not yet become. A Roman emperor, writing at night for no reader but himself, kept returning to this with something close to affection. He reminded himself that nature loves nothing so much as to change what exists and to make new things in its likeness. He was not gritting his teeth against a hard

fact. He was noticing over and over that the whole living world is one great, act of renewal, endlessly making tomorrow out of today, and that he was lucky to be a small moving part of it. To be alive at all is to be handed one fresh, unrepeatable morning after another, each one different from the last. That is not a loss to be endured. That is a gift so constant we forget to unwrap it. I once spent a whole reflection on what it means to let a season end on the things that leave us and how we might carry them tenderly once they are gone. Today is that reflection's brighter companion. Not what leaves us, but what keeps on arriving. And the happiest part of the whole picture, the part we somehow keep forgetting, is that you

yourself are one of the things that is still arriving. You're not only losing seasons, you're You are still, this very year, coming into bloom in ways the person you used to be could not have pictured. Think of what that means. The best conversation of your life may be one you have not yet had. The work that will feel most truly like yours may be work you have not yet learned how to do. Some of the people who will matter most to you by the end could be strangers to you this morning, walking around. in a city you have never visited. None of that could be waiting for you

if you were already finished. It is all still possible for the single reason that you're still moving. Someone once told me about a fear that had ruled the whole of her twenties. A fear so familiar she had stopped thinking of it as a visitor and started thinking of it

as a part of the furniture of who she. she was. And then one day, well into her 30s, she realized with a start that it was simply gone. She had not defeated it in some heroic battle. She had never sat down and conquered it. She had just kept living and kept changing. And somewhere along the way, the person who carried that fear had quietly handed it back, because she had grown into someone who no longer needed it. That is how a great deal of our healing actually happens. Not by force. By becoming day after day, a person for whom the old ache no longer fits,

the way that childhood room no longer fits. This is the quiet mercy hidden inside a changing self. You do not have to win every inner battle by main strength. Some of them you win simply by continuing, by letting the person you're becoming gently outgrow the trouble the person you were could not solve. Time, when we let it move through us

instead of bracing against it, does a great deal of the kindest work on our behalf and asks very little in return except that we keep going. There is a country where every spring, whole cities briefly stop to look at a flower. The cherry trees come into bloom, and people gather beneath them in the parks and squares. And the blooming lasts only a handful of days before the petals begin to come down.

And here is the joyful heart of it. They gather because it will not last. If the blossom clung to the branch all year long, unchanging, no one would come. The whole city would walk past it without a glance. It is precisely because the flowering is brief that people put down their work and lift their faces and feel for a few days unmistakably alive. The passing is not the tragedy of the festival. The passing is the invitation to it.

Your own days are woven from that same bright thread. This exact afternoon, the particular slant of this light, the sound of one loved voice in the next room will never arrive again in quite this form. You could read that as a sorrow, but look what it does the moment you take it to heart. It hands this ordinary afternoon its full and rightful weight. A moment that was promised to last forever

would be worth almost nothing to us, and we would look straight through it. It is the passing, and only the passing that leans close and says with great affection, do not miss this. It will not come again. Attention becomes a kind of gladness once you understand that everything you are looking at is a guest. And once you begin to look for it, you notice that we already adore change in a hundred everyday disguises and only forget that we do. We set an alarm to catch the sunrise, which is nothing but the sky-changing color.

We wait out a whole winter for the first green to push up in the garden. We gather to celebrate one more year of someone's becoming, and we call it a birthday, and we light candles for it. We cheer helplessly when a baby takes its first wobbling steps, which is to say when a small person changes. into someone who can walk across a room. We are not at heart the enemies of change. We are its oldest and most devoted admirers.

We only lose our nerve when it arrives wearing a face we did not expect. And forget in that moment that it is the same old friend who has brought us every single thing we have ever cheered for. And underneath all of this bright turning, The old Taoist teaching points to one steady thing And it is the ground we were promised earlier Beneath the 10,000 changing things it says There is a stillness that does not change

All things rise and flourish each in its own season And each in its own time returns to the place it came from And that quiet route beneath the endless coming and going is given a lovely name. Stillness. Not the stillness of a stop clock. The quiet at the very center of a turning wheel. The rim races and the spokes blur into a single ring of speed.

But the small point at the hub does not move at all. And it is that unmoving center that lets the whole glad wheel turn. There is such a center in a human life, and the best part is that you do not have to build it. You could not build it if you tried. It is already there, waiting on the day you loosen your grip on the racing rim, on the day you stop trying to freeze the blossom, or stay small inside the little room. You have already touched it in a quiet early morning before the day begins its noise.

in the settled calm that arrives after you have laughed until you are tired. In a moment of ordinary attention so complete, watching a face you love or the light moving slowly across a wall that the anxious clock in the chest simply stops ticking for a while. That is the hub. That is the calm still place from which the whole turning of your life stops looking like a threat and starts looking like what it is, a dance you were invited to. From that center, you do not have to brace against the changes. You get to enjoy them.

You get to say yes to what is arriving. This is worth sitting with because it changes what the stillness is for. It is not a locked room you retreat into to hide from the weather of your life. closer to the calm of someone standing in an open doorway on the first warm morning of spring, watching the whole bright, noisy, changing world. Come and go, and loving it all the more for being steady enough to take it in without fear. From the hub, change stops being the thing that happens to you. It becomes the thing you're lucky enough to take part in. The turning of the wheel is no longer a threat to be survived.

It is the reason there is anything to see at all. So I come back at the very end to the childhood room. You stand in the doorway one moment longer, and you find that you are not sad. You feel, if anything, a rush of tenderness and a kind of gratitude. You're glad you no longer feel. fit this room, because the not fitting is the whole happy story of your life since you last stood here. Every friendship, every discovery, every stretch of growing, all of it written plainly in the simple fact

that this room has become too small to hold the person you turned into. You turned to go, and on your way out you understand the most hopeful thing of all. You're not finished. This very morning, you're still becoming someone you have not yet met, and that person is already gathering, the way spring gathers under the ground long before it shows. The room behind you is small, because your world grew wide,

and it is going to keep on widening, because that is what a life does when it is allowed to change. And you will not carry the room away with you. You will carry a better thing. You will carry the plain and astonishing fact that a small person once stood exactly here, certain that this was the whole of the world and then grew and grew until the world itself had to make more room.

If that could happen once, quietly, while you were simply living your days, then think for a moment what must still be on its way to you. Everything changes, and you wonderfully are one of the things that gets to.