You Are More Than Useful - Life Wisdom #64 - Taoism

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 was 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.