Mind and feeling
Zhuangzi
Free and equal
Zhuangzi (Warring States · c. 369–286 BC) — Free and equal.
What actually happened?
He was fishing on the Pu river when two officials arrived from the king of Chu to offer him the government of the state. He didn't put the rod down. I hear, he said, that Chu keeps a sacred tortoise, dead three thousand years, wrapped in cloth and housed in the ancestral temple. Would that tortoise rather be dead and venerated, or alive and dragging its tail in the mud? Alive in the mud, they said. Then go away, said Zhuangzi. I intend to drag my tail in the mud. He refused the trade itself, not the job. Most of the strategists competing for those posts died in the resulting purges. He lived past eighty.
The use of the useless
The tree too crooked to be timber is the one that reaches a thousand years. Things with no immediate use — a hobby that earns nothing, reading with no purpose, experience that won't fit a CV — are often what still holds when everything scheduled has been spent.
Cut along the grain
His cook's blade lasts nineteen years because it never meets bone, only the gaps between joints. Effort that meets resistance everywhere is usually not short of force. It is in the wrong place.
Whose standard is this
There is a right and wrong on that side and one on this side. What looks like stupidity from where you stand is generally coherent from where they stand. Holding several positions at once isn't fence-sitting; it's the thing that shrinks your blind spot.
How do I use it today?
In an environment where everyone is competing, the scarcest capacity is the ability not to enter. Before joining the race everyone else is running, ask whose right and wrong you are using. Keep a third of your time for things with no use — over a long enough horizon that is usually the best-performing position you hold.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
A frog in a well can't discuss the sea. It is bound by its hole.
The friendship of the wise is bland as water.