Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Why does everything take so long ? - Daily Wisdom #59

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Today we're going to sit with a frustration that lives underneath a great many abandoned projects and unfinished changes, the frustration of things that simply take time to ripen.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

At Desjardin Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business, to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff, like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage. Right now, for a limited time, everyone's part of the Buick team, even you.

Buick's employee pricing for you event is on now. Get a purchase credit of up to $3,168 on a 2026 Buick Envision. Surround yourself with signature Buick refinement from an available massaging driver's seat to an expansive panoramic moonroof and a stunning ultra-wide 30-inch diagonal screen. Don't miss Buick's employee pricing for you event. Visit buick.com for more details. Welcome back to Daily Wisdom. Before we begin today's episode,

a word about something you may have already noticed. This episode of Daily Wisdom seems a little different. Until now, Daily Wisdom has come to you in short capsules, five of them across the week, each turning over one small question. From today, we're gathered. that into a single, longer conversation, published at the start of each week. But the intention of these episodes will stay.

We're still starting where you actually live, with the ordinary questions that surface on a difficult evening and following them as far as they'll take us. The same care, the same unhurried pace, the same wish that you leave with something worth carrying. There's simply more space for a story to be told in full, for an idea to unfold, for us to sit with something rather than passing through it. Today we're going to sit with a frustration that lives underneath a great many abandoned projects and unfinished changes, the frustration of things that simply take time to ripen. We'll start with how that feels from the inside, in the ordinary places it shows up. Then we'll look at what we usually do about it,

and why those four familiar responses tend to make things worse. From there we'll turn to an old story about a cook and a knife that has lasted 19 years, which puts the whole problem in a different light. And we'll end back where most of us actually live. On an ordinary evening, with something in our hands that isn't working yet. The question at the middle of it is one most of us have muttered at some point, usually alone, usually with a certain weariness. Why does everything take so long? I'll say now that the answer we're moving toward isn't quite the one you'd expect.

It isn't a lesson about patience. The patience finds its way. way in. What we're going to discover is that the slowness we keep fighting isn't an obstacle standing between us and the thing we want. In most of the cases that truly matter to us, the slowness is where the thing is being made. Let's start by picturing this scene of an ordinary life. It is the second week of March, and a woman is standing in her kitchen holding a guitar she bought in January. She has been practicing most evenings for nine weeks.

Her finger still hurt. The chord changes are still clumsy, and the song she was so sure she would be playing by now still sounds when she attempts it, like someone falling down a flight of stairs. She looks at the guitar for a long moment, then she puts it back on its stand in the corner. and she does not pick it up again for two years.

She was not lazy. She practiced almost every night. She simply arrived the ninth week and found herself still bad, and something in her concluded that this meant she would always be bad, that if it were going to work, it would have worked by now.

Most of us have put something down at the ninth week. So let's begin there with how that stretch actually feels. It is rarely dramatic this frustration. It is a low, wearing thing. You start something because you want it. Genuinely. A language, a craft,

a fitness that would let you climb the stairs without stopping. A business, a book. A way of being calmer than you have been. The first stretch has its own energy. The beginner's rush. Everything new and every small gain visible. And then, somewhere around the sixth or ninth or twelfth week, the visible gains stop arriving.

And you find yourself doing the same work for what appears to be no result at all. That is the moment the frustration enters. Not at the beginning when it is hard but exciting. At the point where it becomes hard and boring, where the effort continues and the evidence dries up, you can feel it in the body. There is a particular slump in the shoulders when you have practiced again, gone again, tried again, and it looks exactly as it looked a month ago. There is the small, sick feeling of doing the work and getting nothing back,

and there is the thought that follows almost every time, phrased slightly differently in each of us but always the same thought. Maybe I am not built for this. It reaches far beyond hobbies. Think of the person who has been in therapy for eight months and still catches themselves doing the thing they came in to stop doing. They have talked. They have understood.

They have seen the pattern. clearly, and the pattern still runs. Understanding it did not dissolve it. And so they wonder whether therapy works at all, or whether they are simply broken in some way that talking cannot reach. Think of the person recovering from an injury, doing the exercises, doing them properly, and the knee is still not right at four months. Or the person who left a job, to build something of their own, and two years in it is still small, still precarious, still not the thing they pictured. Or the couple who have been working on their marriage since spring,

who have had the hard conversations and read the books and been kinder to each other, and who still fall into the same argument on a bad Tuesday. Think of grief, which may be the purest form of this. Somewhere in the back of the mind, there is a schedule for it, an idea of how long it should take before you are functional again, before you can hear the name without flinching, before you stop being someone who is grieving and go back to being someone who once grieved.

And the grief does not consult the schedule. It takes as long as it takes, and part of the pain of it is the low guilt of sense. still not being over something you feel you should have moved past by now. In each of these, there is the same shape. Real effort, applied over real time, and a result that refuses to appear on the timeline we had in mind. Now, the schedule we are measuring against deserves some attention,

because most of us never chose it. We absorbed it. We live surrounded by a compressed picture of how change happens, and the compression is almost invisible because it is everywhere. You see the before and after photograph, and the 18 months between them have been removed. You read the profile of a company that grew fast, and it does not mention the four years before that when nothing worked.

You watch a two-minute video of someone doing something magnificent with their hands, and the 11 years of practice are not in the frame. Nothing here is lying to you exactly. It is simply that the slow part is invisible in every telling, because the slow part is not interesting to watch. So we develop a warped sense of the normal rate of things. We come to expect that effort produces visible change on a short cycle. And when our own life does not behave that way,

we do not conclude that our picture is wrong. We conclude that we are failing. And there is something else in the modern grain that makes this worse, which is that so much of daily life now responds instantly. You want an answer, it is there in a second. You want a film, a meal, a car, a stranger's opinion, a purchase, and the gap between wanting and having has been compressed almost to nothing. This is genuinely wonderful for most of what we do with it,

but it trains a certain expectation into the nervous system, an expectation that the gap between wanting and having is a problem to be, engineered away. Then we bring that expectation to the things that cannot be compressed, learning an instrument, healing a body, becoming trustworthy again to someone you hurt, growing wise, growing up. And these things go at their own speed, which is roughly the speed they went at 400 years ago, because they are made of tissue and habit and trust. And none of those have been upgraded. The result is a permanent, low-grade sense of being behind.

Not behind other people necessarily, behind the schedule, behind where the effort we have already put in should have taken us by now. If you are somewhere in the middle of a slow thing right now, feeling that particular weariness, I want to say plainly that it is not a signal about your character. It is what the middle of a slow thing feels like from the inside. Everyone who has ever finished one has stood exactly where you are standing, feeling exactly this. And most of them were quite sure at the time that it was not working.

Now, if that first part felt uncomfortably familiar, stay tuned. Because the more interesting question is what we do next. We don't simply sit with that weariness, we act on it. And the ways we act are worth looking at together, gently, because this is where the real damage tends to happen. The first thing we do is push harder. If nine weeks of practice has not worked, we will do two hours a night instead of one.

If the business is not growing, we will work weekends. If the body is not healing fast enough, we will do the exercises twice as often and skip the rest days. There is something admirable in this, and it is often exactly the wrong move. Because a great many slow things are not slow due to insufficient input. They are slow because they involve a process that happens between the inputs. Muscle is not built during the workout. It is built in the recovery afterward, which is why training every day without rest produces a weaker body rather than a stronger one.

A language is consolidated during sleep. An insight in therapy has to be lived through a dozen ordinary situations before it becomes a change reflex rather than a good idea. In each case, the effort is only half the mechanism. The other half is time, doing something invisible, and no amount of extra effort can substitute for it. So we double the input and we injure ourselves, or burn out, or damage the thing we were trying to build. And we take that as further proof of our inadequacy. The second thing we do is switch. If this method is not working, perhaps it is the wrong method.

There is a better app, a better teacher, a better system, a better morning routine. So we start again with a new approach and the beginner's rush returns for a few weeks, which feels like progress, and then the same wall arrives and we switch again. This is one of the most common ways a life gets spent, not in failing at things but in repeatedly restarting them. The person who has begun learning Spanish six times has done in total a great deal of work. They have simply never once carried it past the flat stretch where the real acquisition happens. And each restart is genuinely reasonable in the moment, which is what makes the pattern so hard to see.

The third thing we do is quit, and then, crucially, explain the quid. in a way that damages us. This is our guitar in March. It would be one thing to put the instrument down and say, I have decided I would rather spend my evenings differently. That is a clean choice. What we usually do instead is put it down and say, I am not musical.

I do not have the discipline. I am the kind of person who does not finish things. We convert a fact about the timeline into a fact about ourselves. And once that conversion has happened, it is very expensive because it follows us into the next thing and the next. The fourth thing, perhaps the most tempting, is that we look for the shortcut. Every slow domain has a market of accelerants around it,

promising the result without the duration. Some are outright fraud. Many are perfectly sincere, offering real improvements in efficiency. And efficiency is worth having. There's nothing noble about doing a slow thing more slowly than necessary. But there is a flaw under most of these processes that no technique gets beneath. And the marketing is generally silent about the floor. You can learn a language more efficiently, and you will still be at it for years.

You can grieve with support rather than alone, and it will still take the time it takes. You can rehabilitate an injury with the best physiotherapy available, and the tissue will heal at the speed tissue heals. Notice, too, what happens to us while we are hunting for the accelerant. We are not doing the slow world. The search itself becomes a way of not doing the thing, a productive feeling activity that keeps us at the starting line. Whole months go into optimizing a process we have not begun.

Here is where all four of these paths lead, and is worth naming the impasse precisely. We push harder and break something. We switch and lose our accumulated ground. We quit and take a wound. We hunt for a shortcut and stall. And underneath all four is the same unexamined assumption, so obvious to us that we never think to question it,

that the time it takes is the problem, that the duration is an obstacle, an inefficiency, a tax we are paying, and that a better version of this would involve less of value. it. That assumption is where I want to stop, because I think it is wrong. What if the time is not the price of the thing? What if, in the cases that actually matter to us, the time is the thing? Not the delay before the result, but the process by which the result is made. Not the empty stretch we cross to get somewhere, but the somewhere itself being slowly constructed out of days. If that is true, then wanting the thing without the time is not an understandable

wish for efficiency. It is a wish for a different object altogether, one that does not exist. Now this is a very old observation, and people have said it far better than I can. So let's sit with one of them, because it's a story worth hearing in full. There is a moment in the writings of Drungsi, a Taoist thinker, about a cook who works for a lord, cutting up oxen. The description of him working is almost musical. Every movement of his hand, every lean of his shoulder, every touch of his foot, and thrust of his knee falls into a rhythm. And the blade moves through the blade moves through the animal with a sound like a dance. The Lord is astonished and says something like, how can your skill possibly have reached such a height? And the cook puts down his knife and explains.

He says that what he cares about is the way which goes beyond mere skill. Then he tells the story of his own development. And this is the part I want to sit with. When he first began cutting up oxen, He says all he could see was the ox. The whole animal entire a solid mass to be hacked apart. This is the beginner. He had no idea where anything was. He simply attacked the problem with force. After three years, he says he no longer saw the whole ox.

That is a remarkable line. Three years in, the solid mass had resolved into structure, joints, seams, natural, divisions and he had stopped seeing an obstacle and started seeing an anatomy. And now, he says, he works with his mind rather than his eyes. Perception has stopped and the spirit moves as it wants. He goes along with the natural makeup of the animal, guiding the blade through the openings that are already there, following the hollows and the cavities as they exist. He never touches a ligament or a tendon, let alone a bone.

A good cook, he says, changes his knife once a year because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month because he hacks. And his own knife, he says, is 19 years old and has cut up thousands of oxen. And the blade is as sharp as if it had just come off the wetstone. because the joints have spaces between them and the blade has almost no thickness and if you insert what has no thickness into a space there is plenty of room

that is why after 19 years the blade is still as good as new notice what the story is not it is not a story about a man who found an efficient technique for butchery His skill is not a method he acquired. It is something he became over three years to stop seeing the whole ox, and then years beyond that to stop seeing at all and let the spirit move.

The 19-year-old blade is the proof. You cannot buy that blade. You cannot acquire it in a workshop. It is 19 years of a particular relationship with the material, made visible in an object. And here is the thing that matters most for our question. What he is describing is not the reward at the end of a long, boring weight.

There was no waiting. He was cutting oxen the entire time. The three years in which he slowly stopped seeing the whole animal were not a cue he stood in. They were the years in which he was, becoming someone who could see joints. That was the work. That was, in fact, the whole of it.

If you had handed him the mastery at the start, without the 19 years, he would not be that man. He would be a beginner holding an outcome that had nothing to do with him. The Tao Te Ching says something close to this, and it says it in the plainest possible way. It asks whether you have the patience to wait until the mud settles and the water is clear, whether you can remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself. There is no technique offered there, only a question about whether you can bear to let a process complete.

And elsewhere, it makes an observation that reads almost like a warning to everyone, who has ever tried to force a slow thing. A violent wind, it says, does not last a whole morning. A sudden rain does not last a whole day. If even heaven and earth cannot make such things go on for long, how much less can we? That is a very precise description of what happens when we push harder. The intensity is real, and it is unsustainable,

and it does not last. What lasts is the slower thing, the thing that goes at the speed of what it is made of. I want to add one more voice here, because it comes at this from a completely different direction and arrives at the same place. The poet Rilke, writing to a young man who was in a hurry about his own development,

told him to be patient toward all that was unsolved in his heart. and to try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Do not seek the answers, he wrote, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And that is the point. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. gradually without noticing it. That is what the cook's three years were made of, and it is a fairly good description

of how almost every important change in a person actually happens, which is not on the day you decide it, but slowly underneath while you are busy doing the work and feeling like nothing is happening. There is a reason all of these traditions reach for growing things when they talk about this. A fruit ripening is doing something. It is not sitting on the branch waiting for permission.

It is converting starch into sugar, softening its own flesh, developing the aromatic compounds that will make it what it is. All of that takes exactly as long as it takes, and if you pick it early, you do not get an early ripe fruit. You get a different object, a hard, sour thing, which will never become the fruit it was going to be, because the process it needed has been interrupted. And there is no way to see any of it from outside.

The fruit on the branch in week three looks essentially like the fruit on the branch in week four. Nothing visible is happening, but everything is happening. So let's bring all of this home to a Tuesday evening when you're the one holding the guitar and there's no evidence in sight. The first thing it means is that the flat stretch has to be reinterpreted. When the visible results stop,

the natural reading is that progress has stopped. In most slow domains, that reading is simply wrong. The visible results stop because the work has moved underground into consolidation, into the slow conversion of conscious effort into unconscious capacity. The plateau is not the absence of progress. It is what a particular and necessary kind of progress looks like from outside. This is the single most useful thing to know, I think,

because the plateau is where nearly everyone quits. and they quit precisely at the moment the thing is being built. The second thing is about where you look for evidence, since you do need some. The instinct is to check against the destination, which is far away and does not move perceptibly no matter what you do, so every check confirms failure. It is much better to check against yourself at a distance, not can I be able to check against yourself at a distance, Not can I play the song, but can I make this chord change faster than I could in January? Not am I healed, but can I stay in the difficult conversation, 10 minutes longer than I could in spring?

The distances that are actually being covered are small and real, and they're invisible unless you deliberately compare backward instead of forward. The third is a distinction I would hold on to. because I am not arguing that you should stay in everything forever. There is a real difference between quitting because you have hit the flat stretch and quitting because you have discovered you do not want the thing. The second is honest and often wise. The first is almost always premature, and the way to tell them apart is to ask what you are actually running from.

If you would still want this in three years, and the only problem is that it is not yet done, that is the flat stretch and it is worth staying. If you notice you do not want the far end of it at all, put it down cleanly and without the story about your character. The fourth is about attention, and it is the closest thing to a practice I would offer. If the duration is where the thing is made, then the duration is the part worth being present for. This changes what an evening of practice is. It stops being a payment toward a future acquisition,

an hour spent in order to get something later, and becomes an hour of doing the thing, which is a completely different experience from the inside, even though it looks identical from our own. side. The cook was not waiting for 19 years. He was cutting oxen for 19 years. That is the entire difference and it is available to you tonight. The fifth is smaller and more practical. Slow processes are held together by the days you do not feel like it, which means the size of the daily commitment matters more than its intensity.

20 minutes that survive a bad week are worth more than two hours that collapse after nine days. The thing that ripens is fed by continuity, not by peaks. And the sixth is about the company you keep in it, because this is much harder alone. Almost everyone in the middle of a slow thing believes they are uniquely failing at it, and the belief thrives on privacy. It helps enormously to know one other person a little further along, who can tell you that the ninth week felt exactly like this for them too, and that they were also certain it was not working.

Let's go back to that kitchen together. Because there's a version of the evening that ends differently, the same woman, the same march, The same nine weeks, the same sore fingers and clumsy chord changes, and the same song that still sounds like a fall down the stairs. Nothing about her ability is different in this version. She hasn't found a better method. She is exactly where she was.

The only difference is what she makes of it. She notices that she can now change from one chord to the next, without stopping to look at her hand, which she couldn't do in January. She notices that this evening was a little easier than the last, and she understands or half understands that the ninth week is supposed to feel like this, that the flat stretch isn't a verdict, that something is being built in her that won't be visible for a long while yet. So she plays for another 20 minutes.

badly. And then again, the next night. Two years later, in that version, she can play. Not brilliantly, but well enough that people ask her to. And if you asked her how long it took, she would say two years, and she'd be describing not a weight, but a stretch of her life in which she played the guitar most evenings, which is rather a good thing to have done. with two years. Whatever the outcome. The other woman, the one who put it down, also spent those two years.

She simply spent them not playing. That is really the whole of it. The time was going to pass either way. It always does. The only question is whether it passes with a slow thing in it. So here's a question we can each carry with us this week. Think of the thing you're in the middle of right now, the one taking longer than you expected, the one that has started to feel like evidence against you. And ask yourself, honestly,

is it truly going too slowly? Or is it going exactly the speed it goes? And have I been measuring it against a schedule that nobody real has ever met? And if it is the same, it's the same thing, second, which it usually is, then there is nothing here that needs fixing. There is only the fruit on the branch in week three, looking exactly as it looked in week two, doing everything it needs to do.