When I passages like this one from Chuang Tzu, I realize how far away from an ideal Taoist I am:

This life we’re given comes in its own season, and then follows its vanishing away.  If you’re at ease in your season, if you can dwell in its vanishing, joy and sorrow never touch you.  This is what the ancients called "getting free." If you can’t get free, you’re tangled in things.  And things have never overcome heaven…   (92)

    Those words were spoken by a character who is dying, and he is able to look that death straight on and accept his own "vanishing."  Will any of us be able to do the same when it is our time?

    Perhaps.  I think I am fairly good when it comes to accepting the inevitability of my own aging.  My hair is gray, has been for many years now.  I do not attempt basketball or volleyball any more (a torn patella tendon some years ago was a sharp reminder of my fading youth).  In fact, I feel much better, both physically (for the most part) and mentally, at 48 than I did at 28.  And I think it is because, with age, I have learned to let go of certain anxieties.  Yet, I am still "tangled in things."

   Maybe it’s because tax season is upon us, and I am rummaging around in my ill-organized files for this bit of paper or that, realizing, once again, how complicated my life is.  Or maybe it’s the work piling up on my desk in my office, another world of the "things" that steal my time and attention.  And it’s certainly my wife, who, while more anxious about aging, quite naturally follows other Taoist practices that escape me.

     We are different in some ways, similar in others, my wife and I.  But we have an odd complementarity in Tao.  I am good about getting older and I do not dread what will become of Aidan as he ages.  She resists her own aging, as much as she can, and agonizes about Aidan’s future.  But she is good about letting go of material things in the here and now (often to my consternation: "no, don’t throw out that ripped shirt, it’s my favorite…").  She does not covet fancy cloths or fine food or fast cars.  It seems that she has deeply memorized this part of passage 12 from the Tao Te Ching, even though she pays it no attention:

The five colors blind eyes.
The five tones deafen ears.
The five tastes blur tongues.
Fast horses and breathtaking hunts make minds wild and crazy.
Things rare and expensive make people lose their way.

    These, too, are the "things" Chuang Tzu talks about.  My wife has given them up, but still fears aging; I am still enticed by them, but I accept growing older.   Maybe the best we can do is hold fast to a piece of Tao, that piece that we can cultivate within us, and hope we can find the other pieces in the people around us.