Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Wanting without Grasping - Taoism

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

There is a force in us without which nothing would ever be done. It moves us to begin, to build, to love, to hope. It carries us out ahead of ourselves, toward what does not yet exist and what we long to see come into being. We call this force desire. Without it, we would stay still, watching the world go by, never once taking part in it.Welcome back to Life Wisdom, hosted by Substack bestseller author Chen Li, from Words of Taoism.More resources:Free resources, books and more on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://wordsoftaoism.com/⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠My blog⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taoismteachings.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music I use, as a playlist:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to life wisdom. Consider someone pursuing something that matters deeply to them. A work they wish to complete, a success they're reaching toward, a recognition they hope for. The exact shape hardly matters. In the beginning, this desire set them in motion with a fine energy. They rose earlier. They worked with ardor. They felt within them that glad moment.

of one who knows where they are going. But little by little, almost without noticing, something tightened. Now they think of it at night, when they ought to be sleeping. They check their progress over and over, the way one touches a wound to see whether it is healing. They grow irritable at obstacles, impatient with delays, and they measure themselves against those. who seem to be moving faster. The desire that was meant to lift them has become a constant tension,

a tightness that will not release its grip, and it has turned the pursuit of a beautiful thing into a kind of daily suffering. Many know this experience from the inside, and before it, a temptation appears, one that seems full of wisdom. What if the end of the end of the world of the end of the world? answer was simply to desire less, to detach, to loosen our ambition, to stop wanting so much,

and at last find peace. It is this temptation, and what is both true and deeply misleading within it, that I would like to speak of today, for it may be that the problem is not desire itself, but the way we inhabit it, and the old wisdom traditions, the Taoist one above all, have something precious to tell us here, provided we truly listen to them and do not reduce them to what we too quickly assume they say. For we must begin by setting aside a misunderstanding. One so widespread, it has nearly become self-evident.

It is often believed that ancient wisdom asks us to desire nothing at all. We picture the sage as one detached from everything who has extinguished within himself the fire of wanting, who watches the world pass without expecting or wishing for a single thing. We imagine that inner peace would consist in ridding ourselves of desire as one sets down a burden, and that whoever still wants something has simply not yet reached true serenity. This picture is an impoverished reading.

It misses what matters most. Taoism speaks endlessly of water, and water lacks neither strength nor direction. It seems soft. It yields before the obstacle. It takes the shape of the ground it crosses. And yet it is water that in the long run carves through the hardest stone,

cuts the valleys, moves the mountains, There is nothing more persistent than water, nothing more powerful over time. But its power does not come from tension. It comes from following its own nature, without ever struggling against it. This is the heart of what Toa's wisdom has to offer us. It does not ask us to extinguish the living force that dwells in us. It invites us to bring that force into a chord, with the natural movement of things,

rather than setting it against them. What it disputes is never desire itself. It is a certain manner of desiring, taught, and anxious that wishes to wrench rather than to let arrive, and that ends by exhausting itself against the reel the way a wave breaks against a rock. What remains then is to understand,

what separates the desire that gives us life from the desire that consumes us. And this distinction lies first in the source from which the desire springs. For there is a desire that comes from lack, and it is this one most often that gnaws at us. This desire seeks to fill an emptiness. It wants to obtain something, not for what that thing is in itself. but for what it might repair in us, a doubt about our own worth, a sense of not being enough,

an old unease that whispers to us that we must prove ourselves, demonstrate something, earn our place. We believe we desire success, recognition, possession. But what we truly pursue is the soothing of an inner lack that we have cast onto these outward things.

and this is precisely what makes such a desire impossible to satisfy. For the emptiness it seeks to fill is not outside. It is within. No outward success can fill an inner lack, not lastingly. We finally obtain what we wanted, and that strange thing happens, which we have all known. The relief lasts a few days, sometimes a few hours, and then the lack returns, shifts, fastens itself onto a new object.

This position was needed. We obtain it, and soon another is needed. This recognition was needed. It comes, and already it is no longer enough. The desire that comes from lack is a thirst that drinks seawater. The more one drinks, the more one thirsts. This must be said with great gentleness, For such a desire is not a fault.

It is even deeply human, nearly universal. We all carry it in differing measures in one or another corner of our lives. It is not a moral failing to be reproached. It is a suffering to be recognized. The one who is inhabited by this desire is not a greedy soul to be condemned. He is a soul who seeks by the means he has found. to soothe something that pains him. But to recognize this desire for what it is already

changes a great deal. For as long as we believe it is the outward object that we lack, we run endlessly after things that will never fill us. And in doing so, we rob ourselves of the present, sacrificing each passing moment in the name of a future that when it arrives slips away at least. once. The desire that comes from lack has this peculiar cruelty. It makes us live perpetually ahead of ourselves in a tomorrow that never truly comes while real life unfolds now without us.

Happily, there exists another desire of an entirely different nature. And this one does not consume, it unfolds. This desire is not born of an emptiness to be filled, but of a fullness that asks to pour itself out. To understand it, one need only look at a seed. The seed does not become a tree because something's missing in it. It does not grow to repair a flaw, nor to prove its worth. It grows because growing is its nature, because it already carries within it, in germ, the whole tree it is called to become. Its impulse comes not from lack, but from fullness. It is the unfolding of what it is, not the pursuit of what it does not have. So it is within us. There are desires that seek to fill no emptiness, but simply long to unfold.

what we carry. Gifts we feel within us that ask to be expressed. Creative impulses that rise without our having summoned them. Deep callings that grant us no rest until we have honored them. Such desires are not born of our insufficiency, but of our abundance. They do not say something is missing and I must obtain it. They say, I carry something. And that something something asked to see the light. There is something here, both deeply right and very ancient. All that has been given to us, our talents, our sensibilities, our particular strengths, seems to call to be unfolded rather than buried. The one who keeps his gift locked away out of fear, out of excessive caution, out of dread of failure or of the gaze of others,

let something within him wither that asks, to grow. To unfold what one carries is not greed. It is a form of faithfulness, faithfulness to what we have received, faithfulness to what we are called to become. And this desire, because it doesn't depend on the outcome to justify itself, carries within it a peace that the desire of lack will never know. The seed does not agonize over becoming a great tree rather than a small one. It simply unfolds what it can unfold where it stands with what it has received. Its joy, if one may speak so, is in the growing itself, in the movement of unfolding and not in an anxious comparison with the other trees of the forest. The desire that comes from fullness is

ardent, sometimes more ardent still than the desire of lack. But its ardor is tranquil, because it finds its reward in its own impulse. Yet to recognize the source of a desire is not enough, for even a rightful desire, even a desire born of fullness can be poorly inhabited in action. And here a second distinction comes in, perhaps subtler still. the difference between willing and forcing. One can will with all one's strength without ever forcing. There are two entirely different things,

and yet we confuse them endlessly. To will is to orient oneself fully toward an end. It is to commit to it, to devote one's energy, one's time, one's attention. It is to aim high, to refuse the mediator. to reach toward what seems worthy of being accomplished. To will, in this sense, is a beautiful thing, a full thing, that draws upon the best in us. To force is something else entirely.

To force is to tighten against the nature of things. It is to wish to wrench results before their time, as one might pull on a plant to make it grow faster. It is to struggle against the slow. of the reel instead of marrying its movement. It is to mistake the intensity of our inner tension for the effectiveness of our action, when very often the opposite is true. The ancients love the image of the archer, and it says everything. The one who desires too fiercely to strike the target tightens, his muscles tense, his breath catches, his hand trembles slightly. and the arrow misses its mark.

The one who, on the contrary, has long prepared his gesture, who aims with a relaxed attention, who draws the bow and then releases the arrow without stiffening, strikes true. Not because he desires less to reach the target, but because he does not struggle against his own gesture. His will is whole. His tension has vanished.

This is precisely what that Taoist notion designates, the one sometimes clumsily translated as non-doing, and which in no way means in action. Non-doing is not the absence of effort. It is the effort that does not struggle against itself. It is action that accords with the movement of things instead of wearing itself out opposing them. The water that carves the stone does not force.

It follows its slope with a tranquil constancy. And it is precisely for this that it is invincible. And this must be said plainly, for it is freeing. Tension most often serves us nothing. It does not make us more effective. It makes us less lucid, less just, less creative, because it narrows our gaze onto the fear of missing the mark. It exhausts us for nothing.

It steals our sleep. It spoils the path. And very often it makes us fail. Where a relaxed attention would have succeeded. We believe it is our tension that produces our results. It is almost always our commitment, our work, our constancy. And the tension only adds itself to these like a useless suffering. How, then, are we to inhabit an ardent desire in peace?

How are we to will fully without tightening? There is no recipe, but there are inner movements one can learn to make, gently, and they change everything. The first is to distinguish the end from the outcome. The end we may aim for with all our strength. It depends on our commitment, our work, our faithfulness. The outcome does not depend entirely on us. It depends also on time, on circumstances, on others, on a thousand things that escape our mastery.

The art lies in reaching toward the end with all one's soul while releasing the tightened grip on the outcome. To do all that depends on us, fully, ardently, and then to let arrive what does not depend on us without clutching at it. It is the archer who aims with care, then releases the arrow and watches it fly, no longer able nor wishing to call it back. The second movement is to find one's joy in the unfolding itself, and not only in the arrival. As long as all our satisfaction hangs upon the final outcome, the whole path becomes an anxious waiting, and each day that passes without the end being reaffled. becomes a day of lack. But if we learn to savor the work itself, the act of unfolding what we carry,

then each day becomes full, whether it brings us nearer the end or not. The seed does not suffer from not yet being a tree. It grows, and growing is enough for it. The third movement is to listen to what the body tells us, for tension has a very recognition. signature, which the fruitful impulse does not. When we force, the throat tightens, the breath shortens, sleep grows troubled, a dull strain settles into the shoulders and the belly. When we will, without forcing, the body stays open. The breath remains ample, and even intense effort is lived in a kind of fluidity. These signals do not lie.

They tell us at every moment, whether we are unfolding or struggling. And then there is a simple question, almost a question of examination, that one may put to oneself before a desire that gnaws. Do I want this in order to unfold what I carry or in order to fill what I lack? The question alone asked,

often reorient something within us. For many of the desires that torment us reveal themselves in the light of this question to be attempts to repair an inner emptiness. And to see them so is already to begin to be freed from them. There is in all this something that must be affirmed fully without the slightest reservation.

To wish to accomplish great things is profoundly right. Our age at times in reaction against agitation and the race comes to distrust all ambition, as though to desire much were in itself suspect, as though wisdom consisted in wanting nothing great any longer. But this distrust, carried too far, becomes another way of not living.

The one who, out of fear, of suffering, out of dread of failure, out of excessive caution, renounces unfolding what he carries, buries in the earth what had been entrusted to him to bear fruit. He believes he's protecting himself, and he grows poorer. He believes he's finding peace, and he finds only narrowness. The world has need of those who dare. It has need of those who build, who create, who aim high, who are not content with what already exists. It has need of those fruitful desires that bring into the world works, undertakings, beauties that would not exist without them.

Perpetual withdrawal, the refusal of all impulse for fear of being burned is not wisdom. It is a renunciation in disguise which deprives the world of what we might have offered it and deprives us of the joy of accomplishing what we were capable of accomplishing. True fulfillment then is found neither in the anxious race nor in the fearful renunciation. It is found in the serene unfolding of oneself, in that manner of willing fully, of daring widely, of committing with all one's soul, while remaining at peace with the rhythm of things and with what does not depend on us. And there is here a truth that the old wisdoms have always sensed.

All that has been given to us seems to ask to bear fruit. Our strengths, our gifts, our particular sensibilities were not entrusted to us to be buried out of fear, but to be unfolded and shared. To make fruitful what we have received is not greed. It is a form of active gratitude, a way of saying thank you through the very act of unfolding to all that has been given to us without our having deserved it. To desire ardently to accomplish beautiful things. In this sense, is not to depart from wisdom.

It is when this desire comes from fullness and not from lack, one of its highness. expressions. Let us return one last time to the person from the beginning, the one whom desire was consuming. Let us imagine that she has done little by little this long inner work. She still pursues her project. She holds to it as much as before, perhaps more. She still rises early. She works with the same ardor. She still aims as high. From the outside, little has changed in her commitment, but something has changed in the way she inhabits it. She no longer gnaws at herself in the night.

She no longer checks her progress over and over, the way one touches a wound. She no longer compares herself with that anguish that nodded her stomach. She works with intensity by day, and in the evening she sleeps. She holds to her end with all her soul, and yet she has released that tightened grip on the outcome that was wearing her out for nothing.

She has understood that she did not have to choose between desiring ardently and living in peace. She has discovered that peace was not the absence of desire, but desire purified of its anxiety. That one could will with all one's strength without forcing, aim very high without tightening, commit fully while remaining open and tranquil. She has ceased to believe that her inner tension

was the price to pay for her accomplishments, and she has discovered with a kind of astonished relief that she accomplishes more since she set that burden down. I think in closing of that water of which the old texts speak, It moves toward the sea with an immense strength and a total tranquility. It does not hurry, and yet it never stops. It struggles against nothing, and yet nothing withstands it in the long run. It follows its slope, faithful to its nature, simply unfolding what it is.

And it is precisely because it does not tighten that it reaches unfailingly the sea toward which, from the beginning, it has been making its way. We can desire in this way, with that strength and with that peace, to will with all our soul what is worth willing, to unfold fully what we carry, to dare to aim at what seems to us great and beautiful, and to do so without gnawing at ourselves, without exhausting ourselves, struggling against time,

and against the real, simply faithful to what we are and to what we have received. Desire then ceases to be what consumes us. It becomes again what it was at the beginning, before anxiety took hold of it, the tranquil and ardent force by which life through us continues to unfold.