Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - You can Simplify Your Life - Taoism

Episode Date: September 26, 2026

A life left to itself grows the way an unpruned tree grows, in every direction at once, and it is rarely anyone's fault.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

Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. 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. There is an old story about a gardener that I come back to.

because it says in a few lines something that took me years to understand. The gardener was known across the whole region for his fruit trees, which bore more beautifully and more abundantly than anyone else's. And one day, a young man came to his orchard to ask him his secret. The old man told him there was no secret, only pruning. Every winter he went through the trees, and cut away the branches that would bear nothing, the ones growing in the wrong direction,

and the one stealing light from the others. The young man looked at the pile of cut wood at the foot of the trees and asked troubled whether it was not ashamed to lose so much. The gardener smiled and said that what looked like a loss was a gift, because every branch he cut gave its strength the ones that remained. The tree lost nothing, he said. It gathered itself. I've always felt a great deal of sympathy for the young man, because his question is the one most of us would ask.

We look at a full life and see everything in it as something we might lose. And the idea of cutting anything away feels like impoverishment, even when part of us knows that the The tree is tired and that very little of what it carries is bearing fruit. A life left to itself grows the way an unpruned tree grows in every direction at once. And it is rarely anyone's fault. A commitment arrives that seemed reasonable at the time. An object is kept because it might be useful one day. A worry takes root and is never exactly.

And over the years, all of these draw on the same limited sap, so that we end up giving our strength to branches that give us nothing back. Simplifying, in the sense I mean here, has little to do with tidying or with the methods for organizing a home. It resembles what the gardener does in winter, a patient work of discernment in which we learn to tell what is alive from what has died without our noticing, what nourishes from what merely fills, and what belongs to our own nature from what was placed on us from outside. And like pruning, it changes the direction of the whole effort. Most of us were taught without anyone putting it into words, that happiness is found by adding, by finding the missing piece, and bringing it home. Simplification begins from the opposite intuition. That much of what we are looking for is already

here, hidden under what we have piled on top of it, and that the work is to uncover it, rather than to acquire it. Lao Tzu puts this in a single line. In the 46th chapter, of the Talti Ching, he writes that whoever knows that enough is enough will always have enough. It sounds too simple to be worth saying, and yet there is a small revolution folded inside it, because it suggests that the feeling of having enough depends far less on what we possess than on our relationship to what we possess. We all know people who are very little and seem to lack nothing. And people who have a great deal and are never far from the anxious sense that something is missing. The difference between them is rarely to be found in their cupboards.

What makes the line gentle rather than severe is that Lao Tzu gives no number. He does not say how many objects to own, how many evenings to keep free, or how many friendships to tend. because the point where need ends and surplus begins is different for every person. And what nourishes one life may crowd another. So the pruning cannot be done from a rulebook. It can only be done by someone who knows the particular tree, which means that simplification is first a way of coming to know ourselves beneath what our culture has told us we ought to want.

The gardener's first tool is a plain question, and it is why. You can ask it of the object you have not used in years, of the commitment that leaves you drained every week, of the goal you're still pursuing, although it stopped making your heart lift long ago. And if you wait for the honest answer rather than the quick one, you will usually find something underneath that you had not seen. What you tend to find there is some form of fear.

We keep things in case we one day lack them. We hold on to commitments because we are afraid of disappointing someone. And we continue down paths we no longer believe in because turning back would mean admitting we were wrong. Almost every accumulation looked at closely has a small fear at its root. I do not say this as a reproach, and I hope it will not be heard as one. Those fears are human and understandable, and most of us gather things around us for the same reason a person pulls a blanket closer on a cold night, because the world is uncertain and more

feels like protection. The trouble is that the protection does not hold very well. Possessions can be lost or broken, activities that seem permanent can end from one week to the next, and the options we keep open in order to feel free have a way of following us around and weighing on us instead. The surplus we carry for safety shelters us from very little and meanwhile it makes the journey heavier. The security we were looking for in all that gathering lives somewhere else, in a place much harder to lose, the steady confidence that we will be able to meet whatever comes with whatever we have at the time. That confidence cannot be bought or stored. It grows only through experience and

specifically through the experience of having less and finding that we are still all right. Each time you let something go and discover a week later that you do not miss it, something in you learns that your capacity to adapt is larger than your fear suggested. And each time you simplify and find more peace rather than less, the fear loosens its hold further. It is a slow education and one of the kindest a person can give themselves. Most people begin with objects, and that is a good place to begin, because it is where the work is most visible

and where the results can be felt within a single afternoon. What is less obvious is that everything we own takes up room in the mind as well as in the house. Each object asks, however faintly, to be remembered and maintained and stored and dealt with, and even the things forgotten at the back of a drawer exert a low background pressure, a hum we have stopped hearing and have never stopped paying for. When the drawer is finally cleared, many people are surprised by how much lighter their thoughts feel. and anyone can verify this for themselves. The objects, though, are only the outer ring of the tree.

The same habit of gathering runs through our calendars, our relationships and our thoughts, and the finer pruning, the kind that changes a life, happens there. At that level, the gardener's shears, take the form of a word most of us find difficult to say, which is no. A person who says yes to everything ends up saying yes to nothing in particular, because a yes spread across 50 things has too little of anyone in it to mean much. A person who learns to decline what does not belong to their life

finds that their yes becomes whole again, fuller and more present, with more to give to fewer things. The no protects the yes in the same way that the cut branch strengthens the one left standing. This part asks for an honesty that can be uncomfortable, and I would rather say so plainly than pretend it is easy. We sometimes discover that things we have cherished have not nourished us for a long time, and that we keep them from habit or from fear of change, or out of loyalty to a version of ourselves we have outgrown.

We sometimes discover, too, that what we have been calling obligations are choices, made long ago and never revisited, which means that a good part of the complication in our lives is something we are allowed to undo. That discovery can sting at first, and then it tends to feel like a door opening, because a life shaped by our decisions can also be reshaped by them. What follows is rarely what people expect.

We tend to imagine that a simpler life will be a thinner one, duller and less varied, and the reverse is what usually happens. When attention is no longer scattered across a thousand things, it can rest on each of them. And when time is no longer cut into fragments, it can be lived in, so that the fewer things that remain are tasted far more fully

than the many ever were. There is a paradox hiding in our ordinary way of living. And once you have seen it, it is hard to stop seeing. We gather more in order to have more experience and more pleasure and more life, and the gathering itself leaves us unable to enjoy what we have gathered.

There are shelves of books we have no time to read, and evenings full of options we are too tired to choose between, and we move so quickly from one thing to the next that nothing stays with us long enough to touch us. Abundance of that kind produces its own hunger. Pruning reverses the movement, and gives us back our capacity for depth. The few books are read.

The chosen evening is savored. The one conversation is had. And many of us discover along the way that we never wanted many things. That what we wanted was a great deal of a few things. And that only a pruned life has room for it. Our relationship with time changes too. In a crowded lifetime feels like,

an adversary, a scarce resource to be squeezed for every drop, whereas in a simpler one it becomes a friend, a space in which things can unfold at their own pace. And we find that much of our former agitation produced nothing, that it was movement without direction, and that we can do less and see more of it bear fruit. There is a further gift here, and it concerns other people. people. When we own a great deal, it is easy to live under the impression that we are self-sufficient, that we need no one, and that our possessions stand between us and the vulnerability of being human. When we own less, we find again that we need one another to borrow and to share and to hold each other up, and that rediscovery, far from being a weakness, is a return to the

truth of how human beings have always lived. A village once had very few resources and a great deal of solidarity. Each family owned a handful of tools, a few pots and a small store of provisions, and whenever someone needed what they did not have, they walked next door and asked, things move from house to house, and with them, the bonds between people, grew thick and strong. Then the village grew prosperous, and each family could buy everything it needed for itself. The visits between neighbours thinned out,

the borrowing stopped, and everyone lived comfortably inside their own private abundance, until one of the elders remarked with some sadness that when they had been poor, they had been rich in one another, and that now they were rich, they had become poor in their solitude. The story passes no judgment on prosperity. It shows that certain kinds of wealth, connection, and sharing and mutual help

can only exist where we accept not having everything by ourselves, and that some voluntary simplicity can open the door to exchange a gain, drawing us out of an imagined self-sufficiency and back into the living fabric of a community. In the end, the pruning reaches the trunk itself, which is our sense of who we are. Most of us define ourselves by what we have and what we do, by the work and the house and the achievements and the projects, and together these make up the story we tell ourselves about, our own lives. Simplifying unsettles that story, and it can bring questions to the surface that feel vertiginous at first about who we would be without the work, what would remain without the

possessions, and where our worth would lie if it were not measured in what we had achieved. Those questions are uncomfortable, and they also open on to a great freedom Beneath everything we have and do, there is something that remains more fundamental than any of the identities we have layered over it. The contemplative traditions have given it many names, and they agree that it does not have to be acquired or earned because it is what we already are, once the layers are set down. Lao Tzu speaks often of returning to the uncarved block, the wood as it was before anyone shaped it, and all this pruning points in that direction. It resembles the clearing of a stream choked with branches and debris.

The water was always there, flowing underneath the obstruction, and the clearing creates nothing new. It lets what was already present move free. again. This return happens gradually, and I would gently discourage anyone from trying to accomplish it in a weekend. We begin with what is most visible, the objects that crowd our rooms, and move toward what is most subtle, the thoughts that crowd our minds, and at each stage we find that we need less than we feared, that the lack we dreaded does not arrive, and that the space we have made fills with a kind of presence,

the clutter had made impossible. Somewhere along the way, something happens that the young man in the orchard could not have foreseen as he stood looking at the pile of cut wood. Life grows larger as it is pruned, more vivid and fuller, with a different kind of fullness, that of present, rather than possession.

And we find that what we were seeking in all our gathering, the security and the satisfaction and the sense of meaning was waiting on the far side of letting go. So if you find yourself this autumn looking at your own crowded branches and wondering where to begin, you might start with a single cut, one object, or one commitment, or one worry

that has been drawing on your strength for longer than you can remember. Then give it a season, as the gardener does, and watch what the tree does with what it has been given back.