You can Simplify Your Life - Taoism

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 ones 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 a shame 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 to 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 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 examined.

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.