Wisdom comes in the strangest places, doesn’t it? Sometimes the strange nuggets of insight come not from the sages you’d expect, but from portly little bears living in a Hundred Acre Wood that happen to really, really love honey.
I was re-reading The Tao of Pooh the other day and stumbled across wisdom I’d long forgotten, as I think it’d been years since I’d read it. Pooh was talking/learning about “Inner Nature” and a story from the life of Chuang-tse was used as an example. Here was that story:
“While sitting on the banks of the P’u River, Chuang-tse was approached by two representatives of the Prince of Ch’u, who offered him a position at court. Chuang-tse watched the water flowing by as if he had not heard. Finally, he remarked, “I am told that the Prince has a sacred tortoise, over two thousand years old, which is kept in a box, wrapped in silk and brocade.” “That is true,” the officials replied. “If the tortoise had been given a choice,” Chuang-tse continued, “which do you think he would have liked better—to have been alive in the mud, or dead within the palace?” “To have been alive in the mud, of course,” the men answered. “I too prefer the mud,” said Chuang-tse. “Good-bye.”
Alive in the mud, not dead within the palace. Me too tortoise, me too Pooh.
The entire section is about each person’s Inner Nature, the way they are truly born to be, their natural proclivities. It’s about how everyone is different, everyone has different needs (remember last week’s Signal Fire?!), different wants, different music played by different drummers that they walk to. When we betray this, when we fight it, our lives dissolve.
Haven’t we all been there? Haven’t we all felt this? Haven’t we taken jobs that we knew didn’t satisfy our souls just for a paycheck? Haven’t we stayed in relationships that we knew were not good for either person, just to keep the peace, just to maintain the illusion of happiness to others, or to ourselves? Haven’t we all felt some measure of success that secretly felt like suffocation? We’ve all been the tortoise, haven’t we?
I think of this often, I think of this when I write about it as I did recently in the piece below, and I realize how dead on the damn nail both Chuang-tse and Benjamin Hoff, and Pooh by proxy got it.
The Things We Trade For Money | 11.9.25
It was a random Thursday in the beginning of March just after noon, and I had a giant pretzel in my hand when an epiphany hit me with an almost nuclear force.
I think so many of us spend so much time aiming for the palace, often at all costs, that we forget what we lose in doing so. I know there does exist a small subsection of our population that have somehow hit the Life Lottery and managed to end up in the palace, enjoying all its riches, whilst somehow still maintaining every ounce of their joy by following their true Inner Natures, but dammit, they are rare, rare creatures. Most of us spend so much time trying to get to that palace, or hell even within the outer streets of that mythical walled city, that we forget the beauty of being completely alive in all the mud outside.
Last week I spoke about the shortcomings of the Golden Rule, the idea that it missed the mark simply because it assumed a sameness that just doesn’t exist. This is that too, but instead of being about some moral code or compass, it’s about the “Dream” I think we’ve all been taught for so many years. American Dream or otherwise. For so long we’ve been taught that money is the goal, that having more means being more. We’ve been taught that fame is another, that the more people that recognize us in the streets the happier we’ll be, the more we’ll be able to do, amass, enjoy.
These are the palaces of this fallacy, these are the lies the American Dream has been selling us all this time. It’s propaganda, and while we don’t need to get into who is pumping out all that rhetoric (*cough*corporate capitalism*cough*), the fact remains that it is rhetoric after all.
How many creatives are stuck in the endless slog through corporate metrics? How many introverts are being constantly forced into some strange extroverted role, just to get by? How many gentle souls tossed and tumbled in competitive industries that suck the tenderness from them? What of wanderers who are building stable lives that bore them to tears? What of healers, sages, mystics, and rare geniuses forced to become influencers on social media just to get by? What of writers who have to beg their followers to upgrade their subscriptions just so they can make ends meet and feed their families?
Bottom line, not every environment is perfectly suited to every nervous system, and not every kind of success works for every kind of soul. We’re wired different, all of us, and we have to stop spending our lives betraying our own Inner Natures just to fit into some shiny ideal they tell us we’re supposed to fit into. Simply:
The right life is not always the most impressive one, it’s the one that lets you truly breathe.
It’s ok if the life that everyone else aims for doesn’t feel like yours. It’s ok if you can’t keep up with the endless toil for more. It’s ok if you don’t want to. It’s ok if you’re sick of posting schedules for social media or trying to market yourself on LinkedIn. It’s ok if you don’t have a million followers that you’ll most likely never have a single conversation with. It’s ok if you’re in the mud, as long as while you’re there, you’re like Pooh, enjoying the hell out of it on a hot summer day.
We’re surrounded by ‘sacred’ tortoises living in silk and brocade, kept perfectly safe in a perfectly fancy box in a perfectly stunning palace. We’re told that’s the life we should aim for, the one of privilege that protects us from the scuffs and scratches, the dust and debris of another kind of life. We’re told that’s the point of all this, better silk, better wood to build those boxes from. Only I think it’s all bullshit, and I think there’s something bigger waiting for us. Only I think that it takes quieting all the other voices in order to actually hear our own, the real whisper from our own Inner Nature.
I don’t know what yours is, I won’t pretend to, but I’ll just close in urging you to lean in, to listen, and to figure that out. It should be the first question we answer, THE question we keep asking until we really know.
Would you rather be alive in the mud, or dead within the palace?
Ask yourself, and listen to the answer. I have a suspicion that you, like me, like Pooh, and like that poor tortoise, would feel the same. I have a suspicion that you, like Pooh, would simply say:
“I like mud, too.”
Like he said, on the hot summer days that we call a life, there really is Nothing like it.
