Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - You Are More Than Useful - Life Wisdom #64 - Taoism

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

When two people meet for the first time, the first thing they exchange is a name, and the second, almost always, is a question: so, what do you do?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

For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean. Like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds. Natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow. It means their safety and your piece of... No. In Swedish, Natapa means night monkey. IKEA, 50 years of Swedishness at home. Look, he's wearing little pajamas.

So cute. Welcome to Life Wisdom. I am Chen Li, author of the blog Word of Taoism on Substack, and you're listening to my podcast. When two people meet for the first time, the first thing they exchange is a name. And the second, almost always, is a question. So what do you do? We ask it kindly to find common ground. And yet the question carries an assumption so familiar that we no longer hear it.

A person is best understood by their function. Children learn this early, since they are asked what they want to be long before they can know. And they notice that the answer, expected, is a job rather than a way of being. By the time we are adults, most of us have absorbed the lesson so well that we apply it to ourselves all day long, weighing each hour by what it produced. You can feel it on a Sunday afternoon with nothing planned when a small unease arrives after an hour on the sofa, as though rest were something to be accounted for.

You can feel it in the way we say we deserve a holiday or have earned an evening off, as if being allowed to stop required a receipt, The habit has an innocent beginning because most of us were praised as children at the moments when we were helpful, when we tidied up, carried something, or did well at school. Nobody meant any harm by it, and yet a child draws conclusions so that somewhere, in those years, many of us decided that being loved and being useful were the same thing. From there it is a short step to the adult who cannot sit down while someone else is working or who apologizes for being ill

as though a fever were a failure of duty. I would like to set beside that habit a very old story about a tree which Zhuangzi told more than once because he seems to have known how much we would need it. A master carpenter named Shai was traveling with his apprentice when they came to a village

where an enormous oak stood beside the local shrine. The tree was so broad that a whole herd of oxen could have sheltered beneath it and it rose so high that its lowest branches began far above the rooftops.

A crowd had gathered to admire it as people gather at a market whereas the carpenter walked past without slowing down and without turning his head. His apprentice, who had stopped to stare, ran to catch up with him and said that since the day he first picked up an axe, he had never seen a timber so magnificent. The carpenter told him to forget it because the wood was worthless, A boat made from it would sink, a coffin would rot, and a pillar would be eaten by worms.

It is good for nothing, he said, and that is the only reason it has been allowed to grow so old. The carpenter's glance deserves a moment of attention, because he was an expert, and everything he said about the wood was probably true. What he could not do was see a tree, since his trade had taught him to see planks, and where no planks were possible, there was nothing left for him to look at. Usefulness always works that way because a thing is useful for something, and that something is nearly always another person's purpose, whether a boat to be built or a door to be hung. So, when we measure ourselves only by how useful we are, we are borrowing the carpenter's eye

and turning it on our own lives, looking for planks. On the days when we find plenty of them, we feel that we have a right to exist, and on the days when we find none, we feel like the oak under his verdict. I think many people live under that verdict for years, especially those who are ill or out of work or growing old or caring for someone in a way no one counts. That night, as the carpenter slept,

the oak appeared to him in a dream and spoke. What are you comparing me to? It asked, the useful trees? Look at the pear and the orange and the apple, and at what their usefulness has earned them. As soon as their fruit is ripe, they are stripped and their branches broken, so that their own gifts make their lives bitter, and few of them see old age. Elsewhere, Zhuangzi adds that the cinnamon tree is cut down because its bark can be eaten, and the lacquer tree is slashed because its sap can be used.

You may know someone like those trees, or you may be one of them, the person everyone turns to, who is capable and generous and therefore always asked. Such people are often worn down by their best qualities, since the more they give, the more is expected, and nobody thinks to wonder whether the branch can bear another harvest. It tends to happen without anyone deciding it because the colleague who is good at fixing things is brought everything that breaks and the friend who listens well

becomes the one everybody calls saying no is hard for them partly out of kindness and partly because their place among others seems to rest on being needed so that refusing feels like risking the place itself. They may even be proud of how much they carry, and rightly so, although the pride hides a question

they seldom ask. Who would they be if they put some of it down? If that is you, I hope you can hear the oak's words as tenderness rather than reproach, because it is describing your tiredness with great accuracy, and it is on your side. Then the oak said the thing that, the carpenter had not expected. I have been trying for a long time to be of no use, it told him, and it nearly cost me my life. Now that I have managed it, the tree went on, it is the greatest use I could have, for had I been good timber, would I ever have grown this large? The oak admits in passing that it nearly died along the way, and that detail, matters since it means the tree was not spared by luck.

Stepping back from constant usefulness has a cost, because the people around us are used to the fruit, and some of them will be puzzled or even hurt when a branch is no longer offered. There may be a difficult season in which you are less needed and have not yet found what you are instead, and it takes some courage to remain standing through it. The oak's long life suggests that the season passes,

and that those who love you will go on loving you when you carry less, perhaps with some relief at seeing you rest. The carpenter had judged the tree by what could be taken from it, whereas the tree was speaking of what it had become by being left whole. Because nobody had cut it into boats, it had turned into something no boat could ever be, a canopy wide enough for a village, a place where travellers rested and children played. It gave shade in summer and shelter in the rain, and its sheer presence beside the shrine made people stop and look up, which may be the oldest form of prayer.

No one would call these things useful in the carpenter's sense, since they cannot be sold or measured. And yet the village would have been far poorer without them. People are like this too, and the best of what they give is seldom their output. Think of the person in your life whose company steadies you and ask what it is that they do, and you will probably find that you cannot see.

say. They listen, perhaps, or they are glad when you arrive, or they sit with you in a hospital corridor without trying to fix anything, and you leave feeling less alone. A grandmother who can no longer cook or drive or help with anything may still be the centre around which a whole family gathers, as that oak was for its village. She sits in her chair by the window while the younger ones come and go, and each stops beside her for a moment, to tell her something or only to be near. If you asked what she contributes, the family would not understand the question, because what she gives has no name, although the house would feel hollow without it.

A very young child offers the same lesson from, from the other end of life, since a baby produces nothing whatsoever, and nobody has ever doubted its worth for that reason. We sense the worth of such people immediately, and we would be shocked if anyone called them useless, although we rarely extend the same understanding to ourselves. Huangzi had a friend named Huizi, a sharp logician who wants to.

told him that all his talk was useless, and Zhuanzi answered with an image I find very helpful. The earth is vast, he said, and a person standing on it uses only the small patch under their feet, which is all they need in order to stand. Now suppose you dug away all the ground they were not using right down to the depths so that only that patch remained, would it still be of any use to them? Huisi had to admit that it would not, since nobody can stand on a pillar the size of two footprints, and Zhuanzi replied that the usefulness of the useless was therefore plain. The same is true of a life because the productive hours are the patch under our feet, and they're held up by everything around them that seems to serve no purpose. Sleep, idle walks, long meals, play,

friendship with no aim, an hour spent watching the rain. Remove these in the name of efficiency, and the useful hours have nothing left to stand on. Huisi on another occasion, complained that he had grown gourd so enormous that they were good for nothing, too heavy to carry water and too wide to make a ladle. He had smashed them in frustration, and Zhuangzi told him he was clumsy with large things, since he could have tied one to his waist and floated down the rivers on it. The gourd was only useless for the purposes who he already had in mind,

and the moment he stopped asking what it was for, he might have seen what it could be. Much of what we dismiss in ourselves is like that gourd, whether a temperament too slow for the office, a sensitivity that gets in the way, or a love of things that earn nothing. They fail the tests we set for them, and yet they may be exactly what would carry us across the water, if we stopped trying to make ladles out of them. In the same conversation, Huizzi mentioned a tree of his own, so gnarled and knotted that no carpenter would look at it,

and he offered it as a picture of Zhuangzi's useless ideas. Zhuanzi suggested that he planted in the village of nothing at all, in the wide and empty fields where he could wander beside it, doing nothing and lie down beneath it for an easy sleep. No axe will ever shorten its life, he added. And since it is of no use to anyone, what could possibly trouble it? I love the idea of that village,

because each of us has such a place somewhere, an hour or a corner where nothing is expected, and most of us visit it far too seldom. I should be careful here because the oak is making no argument against work or against being of service to others. Good work is one of the real joys of a life. To be useful to someone you love is a pleasure nobody would want to give up. The oak itself gives a great deal, after all, and the difference lies only in the order of things, since it gives from what it is rather than existing for what it gives.

A child is loved before she has done anything at all, and that love is the ground on which everything she later does will stand. Somewhere along the way, we reverse the order and begin to believe that we must be useful first in order to be worth something afterwards. Underneath that belief, there is often a fear, which rarely gets said aloud that if we stop being useful, we might stop being wanted. It surfaces at the turning points of a life, when someone retires after 40 years, when children leave home, or when illness takes away what a person could once do. people in those moments sometimes say that they no longer know what they are for

and I find that sentence very moving because it shows how completely they had been measuring themselves in planks I would like to say to anyone standing at such a point that the oak grew to its full size only after the carpenters had stopped being interested in it I believe the oak is right and we are mistaken, and that a person's worth comes first and stays whole, whether the day held great accomplishments or none.

When the carpenter woke, he told his apprentice about the dream, and the young man who was clever, objected at once. If the tree is so intent on being useless, he asked, what is it doing standing next to a shrine where everyone can admire it? Hush, said the carpenter, say no more. It is only resting there, and if we judge it by ordinary standards, we shall be very far from understanding it. That is all drungsie tells us.

And yet the change is unmistakable, since the man who walked past without a glance now asks his apprentice to lower his voice. Nothing about the tree had altered overnight. And the wood was as poor as ever. So what had changed was the eye that looked at it? That change of eye is available to us on an ordinary Monday. And it begins with small permissions. You might rest one evening this week without explaining to yourself why you have earned it. And notice the old unease rye's rye. and if you let it pass. You might do one thing for no reason at all,

such as a walk that leads nowhere or a drawing no one will see and let it be good for nothing. And you might look at one person, perhaps someone old or unwell or lost at the moment without the carpenter's eye, asking nothing of them except that they be there. It may be that someone looks at you in that way already,

and that their affection has never depended on what you managed to get done. Something shifts in a relationship when the measuring stops because the other person senses, often without knowing why, that they are no longer being assessed. A teenager watched for results relaxes when a parent sits beside them for no reason. reason, and an aging father who fears being a burden brightens when asked for his company. The same ease reaches you from the inside as well, since the eye you turn on others is the eye you turn on yourself, and softening one tends to soften the other.

Picture the oak at the end of a summer day, when the heat is leaving the fields and the light comes low and gold through its leaves. A few travellers are sitting against the trunk with their packs beside them, and children are chasing each other around the roots while an old man dozes in the shade. Not one of them is asking what the tree is for, since they have found a place to rest, and the tree which has room for all of them asks nothing in return. A place is waiting for you there as well, and you do not need to bring anything in order to take it.