After 50, Owning Less Gives You These 5 Things — Lao Tzu

You are on your knees in the attic with one hand flat on a wooden crate you have carried through four houses and never opened, and after 50, owning less gives you back more than that crate ever held. One of the things owning less gives back is sealed inside that crate right now, and it is not a thing at all. Five things come back when the hands get emptier, and Lao Tzu, with a little help from Zhuang zipoints to every one of them. Your Saturday is a quiet heart, the readiness to go, a fourth that is inside this crate, and enough. Almost nobody believes the fourth until the lid is off. Dust turns in the late light from the small window. The rope handles are stiff and gray, and below you the house is quiet. Every year this crate stays shut, it costs you a few more Saturdays. And after 50, you do not know how many Saturdays are left. This is not a lecture on slow living. It is about the second half of a life and the quiet craft of setting things down. A merchant is walking a road in the south a long time ago, pushing a cart piled high with fine ceremonial caps, and the people in the village ahead of him have cut their hair short. Keep that cart in mind. We will need it when the lid comes off. But the first thing owning less gives back is the one you gave away without noticing, one weekend at a time. It is Saturday and it is already spoken for. There is the storage unit out past the edge of town, which you pay for every month and visit once a year, to check that the things you do not use are still there. There is the second car in the drive, which nobody has driven since spring, and which wants its registration renewed and its battery charged, and has a flat tire you keep meaning to see to. There are the gutters. There is the mower, the shed, the room over the garage, the camper under its cover, that has not been out for four summers. None of these things is bad. Every one of them was bought on a good day, for a good reason, by a person who was younger than you and had somewhere to put them. But every one of them has been asking for a little of you ever since. A Saturday. A worry on a Tuesday night. A key on the ring. A payment on the second of the month. A glance out of the window when the wind gets up. Ownership does not end at the checkout. It begins there and it does not stop. And here is the Saturday you remember. Your daughter rang early and said the children were at a loose end and would you come over for lunch? Nothing special, just come. And you said you would love to, but you had the gutters. She said of course another time. You cleaned the gutters. They were full again by November. After 50, a surprising amount of a life is spent as the caretaker of a museum nobody visits. You polish it. You insure it. You move it from house to house, and you give it the one thing you have less of every year, which is the ordinary days. Lao Tzu, in the 19th chapter, tells rulers to give up cleverness and profit, and then ends with a short instruction. Show the plain silk, he says. Lessen the self. Have few desires. Plain silk is the cloth before anybody has dyed it or embroidered it or cut it to a pattern. It is not poor cloth. It is cloth before it has been asked to be anything. A Saturday with nothing in it is plain silk. It has not been cut to the shape of the gutters, or the storage unit, or the second car. It is simply the day whole before anything has claimed it, and you have not had one in years. What people now call slow living is mostly that and nothing more exotic. It is owning few enough things that a day can arrive undyed. Notice what Lao Tzu puts in the middle of the instruction, lessen the self. He does not say lessen the house. The things were never only things. Each one was a small piece of who you thought you were. The man with the camper. The woman with the good car. The family with the room over the garage. Every object you keep for the person you used to be is a Saturday the person you are now does not get. So the first thing that comes back is time and time after 50 is the only currency that does not come back on its own. But the Saturdays are only the time things take. There is a second cost and you pay it standing at your own front window, looking at the drive next door. There is a new car next door. Dark blue, still with the dealer's plate, parked a little further forward on the drive than it needs to be. You noticed it on Thursday. And you have noticed it every time you have passed the front window since. You do not want that car. You are almost sure you do not want that car. And yet it has been in your head for three days sitting there, costing you something. Then there is the catalog. It comes on the mat every week or so, heavy and glossy, full of rooms that nobody lives in. Chairs you did not know you needed until page 11. A kitchen so white that nothing has ever been cooked in it. You flick through it, standing in the hall, and when you put it down the house you actually live in, looks a little shabbier than it did five minutes ago. Lao Tzu saw this more than 2,000 years before the catalog. In the third chapter, he says something that sounds at first, like a rule for kings. If a ruler stops prizing goods that are hard to get, the people will stop stealing. If he stops displaying what is desirable, the people's hearts will not be stirred up. Read that with the new car in the window. The thief is not somewhere out on the street. The thief is the wanting, and what it steals is your afternoon. The moment a thing is prized because it is rare, or new or shown to you under good lights, a small restlessness starts in you, and the restlessness does not care whether you ever buy it. The heart has already been stirred. The quiet is already gone. And here is the part that is harder to hear. Envy is a possession too. You own it, you carry it, you take it out and look at it at night. It takes up room exactly like the second car does. It needs maintaining. When you have fewer things, you have fewer things to compare. And when you stop measuring your kitchen against the one in the catalog, The measuring stops taking up room in you. That is what simple living actually gives, and it is not what the advertisements for it promise. It does not give you a better kitchen. It gives you a heart that is not being stirred all day by kitchens. Not wanting is its own rest. You will have felt this once or twice without a name for it. A long weekend in a borrowed cabin with nothing but a table and a view. Three days, and you did not think about anything you owned, because it was all a hundred miles away. You came home and said you had slept better than in months. It was not the mattress. For three days, nothing was asking to be compared. The new car will get old. The catalog will come again next week. Lao Tzu is not asking you to hide from either. He is saying that a heart can learn not to be moved by what is put in front of it and that a house with less in it gives the heart less to practice on. A quiet heart is something you can feel while sitting still. But the third thing you only feel when somebody asks you to move. The phone rings on a Sunday evening, and it is your youngest, the one who lives across the ocean now. The baby is not sleeping, her husband is away for work for the whole of next month, and she says, Not quite asking, I suppose you could not come for a few weeks. You would love to. You say so. And while you are saying so, a list has already started in your head. Who would take the dog? Who would watch the house? The post piling up behind the door. The car that needs moving so the battery does not die. The plants. The payment on the storage unit that comes out on the second. The man who is meant to come about the boiler. By the time you have put the phone down, the list has won, and you have said, let me see what I can do, which both of you know means a long weekend at most. The things did not stop you. You did. But the things gave you your reasons, and each reason was true. You may have known someone who was the opposite. An aunt, perhaps, or an old friend of your father's, who lived in two rooms with a good coat, a few books, and one small suitcase always half-packed at the bottom of the wardrobe. When anyone rang anywhere, she came. A wedding in another country. A funeral 400 miles away. A niece who needed somebody for a month. She could leave in an hour. People called her eccentric. She was the freest person you ever met. Lao Tzu has a chapter that is about her, although it is written as advice to rulers. In the 59th chapter, he says that in governing people and in serving heaven, nothing is better than sparing. Some translators give the word as frugality, some as restraint, some as moderation. It means using little and keeping in reserve. And then he says the thing that makes the chapter. Sparing, he says, is being ready early. It is having prepared long before you are asked. Read that on a Sunday evening with the phone still warm in your hand. The person who owns little is not the person who has given up. She is the person who is already ready. Everything she did not buy was a reason she will not need to give. When the call comes, there is nothing to arrange, because she arranged it years ago, by not owning the list. Lao Tzu goes on. Sparing, he says, is having a deep root and a firm stem. That is the image, and it is the opposite of what we assume. We think the person with many things is rooted and the person with few is drifting. It is the other way round. The things are not roots. They are weight. The root is the part of you that can go wherever it is asked and still be itself when it gets there. After 50, you do not know how many more of those phone calls you will get. That is not a gloomy thing to say. It is simply how the second half is counted. Readiness is the difference between a yes and a let me see. And by now you might be feeling rather pleased with the whole idea. Hold that feeling because before we lift the lid, there is a way of owning less that turns out to be one more thing to own and it is the good people who fall into it first. Owning less can become one more thing to own. It happens quietly and it happens to good people. It starts with a clear shelf. Then the shelf is photographed and the photograph is sent to someone and then there is a small pride in the shelf that is exactly as heavy as the clutter was. You find yourself standing in your sister's kitchen with its jars and its piled post and its drawer that will not shut. And you feel something that is not quite pity and not quite superiority. And it is both. You have become a person with opinions about other people's drawers. And then there are the new simple things. The plain linen that cost more than the old patterned linen. The one good bowl handmade very expensive very plain. The car that is smaller and cost twice as much. The simple life bought new and delivered. None of it is wrong. But if you have swapped a house of things for a house of the right things, you have not set anything down. You have only changed what you are carrying, and you are still carrying it. Lao Tzu would have no patience with any of this. The plain silk is plain because nobody made a show of it. The moment it is displayed, the third chapter comes back round, and the heart is stirred again. Only now it is stirred by your own shelf. Then there is the harder thing, and it is about your parents. You may remember their house. The jars washed and kept in rows under the sink. The string saved in a ball in the kitchen drawer. The brown paper folded and smoothed out after every birthday. The shed full of timber offcuts, the tins of screws sorted by size, the coats that were never thrown away only handed down. It is easy now to smile at that. It is easy to call it hoarding, and to stand in their emptied house after the funeral with a hired dumpster in the drive and feel a kind of exasperation. But your parents were not foolish. Many of them had once had nothing, really nothing, in a way most of us after them have never had to learn. A jar was a thing you might need. A length of string was a thing you might not be able to get. They kept every scrap because they had once lived in a world where scraps were the difference. That was not greed. It was memory kept in jars. And one day, if nothing changes, your own children will stand in this house with a dumpster in the drive and feel that same exasperation about you. So nobody here is a villain. Not your parents with their string. Not your sister with her drawer, Not you with your crate. Everyone who ever kept too much kept it for a reason, and the reason was usually love or fear, and very often both. And one more thing, said plainly, because it belongs here. If the things in your house are a person you have lost, a wardrobe still full, a set of tools still hanging where you left them, grief keeps its own calendar, and nothing here asks you to empty a room before you are ready, this is not a race to a bare floor. It is a question you are allowed to answer slowly, which brings you back up the ladder and back onto your knees in the late light because the fourth thing is inside the crate, and it is time to lift the lid. The rope handles are stiff, the lid sticks, and then it gives, and a smell comes up that you know before you can place it. Old paper, cedar, and something that might be a house you lived in 30 years ago. On the top, folded in yellowed tissue, is a christening gown, long white with a row of tiny buttons down the back, worn by each of your children in turn for about an hour. Under it, a bundle of school reports tied with string, every one of them, from the first year to the last. Under those, wrapped in newspaper from a year you can remember, the good plates. Twelve of them gold-rim, never once put in a dishwasher, used perhaps nine times in forty years, and tucked down the side on its own a single small shoe, scuffed at the toe. You know why you kept these. You kept them for the children. That is what you have told yourself every time you carried this crate up another ladder in another house. Someday they will want them. Someday it will matter that you kept them. This is love stored. This is what you leave behind. And you have believed that, as nearly everyone believes it. That the boxes in the attic are a kind of inheritance, and the more carefully they are kept, the more they mean. Now remember last Christmas. You mentioned the plates. Your daughter laughed kindly and said, I have nowhere to put twelve plates, I barely have room for the ones we use. Your son said maybe, and then changed the subject. You laughed too. And then you carried the crate up to the attic in the next house anyway. Here is the merchant again with his cart. In the first chapter of the book that carries his name, Zhuangzi tells about a man from the state of Song who dealt in ceremonial caps. Fine caps, the kind worn at court and at the great rites. He loaded them up and carried them south to the land of Yue to sell them. But the people of Yue cut their hair short and marked their bodies with tattoos. They had no use for caps at all. nobody in the story is foolish the caps were good caps the people of you were not wrong to cut their hair the merchant simply carried the right things a very long way to people who had no use for them the story does not say he ever asked you have been carrying caps to you through four houses up four ladders to people who cut their hair short years ago and were too kind to say so twice so what were they asking for all those years while you carried the crate they never wanted the plates they wanted your saturdays remember the phone early on a saturday would you come for lunch nothing special just come and you had the gutters that is the fourth thing owning less gives back and almost nobody believes it until the lid is off your children not the idea of them that lives in a crate waiting for someday. The actual people now, who have been asking for years for the one thing that was never in a box. The keeping and the carrying and the storing were all, somewhere underneath, a way of loving them from a distance. The crate was easier than the lunch. And that was not a failure of love. It was a habit of love that made sense once, and has quietly stopped making sense the way a great many things do after fifty without anyone telling you. Which leaves the fifth thing, and it is the only one of the five you can have this evening without opening anything at all. Sit at the kitchen table in the late light with nothing on it but your two hands. Somewhere in you there is a number. There always has been. At thirty it was a house with a garden. At forty it was a certain amount put away, and then you would stop worrying. At fifty-five it was the house paid off, and the one good holiday and the car that would last. You reached every one of those numbers. And each time you got there, the number had quietly moved on ahead of you, like a lantern carried by someone walking a little faster than you can. That is not a flaw in you. It is how wanting works. Wanting does not have a finish line. It has a next thing. One more room. One more year of work. One more thing for the house, and then it will be right. Lao Tzu wrote the 46th chapter for exactly this. He begins with horses. When the world has the way, he says, the fast horses are turned back to pull the dung carts in the fields. When the world has lost the way, war horses are bred out on the border. It is a picture of two countries. One of them is using what it has for ordinary life, for the soil and the harvest. The other is raising more and more, for a war that is always somewhere out ahead. A house can be either of those countries. So can a person. And then he says it plainly, and in one rendering it goes like this. There is no greater misfortune than not knowing what is enough. Whoever knows that enough is enough will always have enough. Look at how the last sentence is built. He does not say whoever has enough will know it. He says it the other way round. The knowing comes first. The having follows from the knowing, not the knowing from the having, which means enough was never a number. It was never going to be reached by adding one more thing to the house. It is a feeling, and it is a feeling you can have today, at this table, with the house exactly as it is. You have had it before, without calling it anything. A cold morning, a hot drink, and nothing wrong. A good meal with two people you love and nowhere to be after it. The last hour of a long drive home, when the road is familiar and the light is going. In each of those moments you did not want one single thing. You were not being wise. You simply noticed for a few minutes that it was already enough. Owning less does not make enough arrive. Nothing arrives. What happens is quieter than that. When the house stops asking you for one more thing, you start hearing the moments that were enough all along. They were always there. They were just harder to hear over the gutters and the catalog and the list by the phone. Enough is the fifth thing and the last. But before you kneel back down at that crate and decide what to do with what is in it, there is a second half to the merchant's story. It is about an emperor who came home one day and could not remember what he owned, and it explains your whole house. Go down the ladder now and walk through the house with the merchant's cart in your mind. The dining room first. A table for twelve, with two leaves in it, which seats two people most nights and has done for a decade. That table was bought for Christmases with everyone home and for a while there were such Christmases, and they were loud and wonderful. Now it is a cart of caps standing in a room you walk past. The spare room with the bed made up for guests who come twice a year, and the wardrobe full of clothes for a job you left. The garage where the car does not fit, because the garage is full of the things that did not fit in the house. The hall cupboard, with the tennis rackets and the good umbrellas and the board games with pieces missing. Room after room, you are the merchant of song, still standing in the market square with your cart, waiting for a customer who is never going to come. Zhuangzi does not leave the story there, and what comes next is the part that usually gets left out. In the very same passage, right after the caps, he tells about the Emperor Yao. Yao had brought the whole world into order. Every province governed, every people settled. And then he went to see four masters on a far mountain, beyond a river in the north, and when he came home he had forgotten his empire. Not lost it. Forgotten it. The whole enormous thing he had built and managed and worried over simply stopped occupying him. It was still there. He just was not carrying it anymore. Put your hand flat on the table for twelve, on the leaf nobody has taken out in ten years. That is what Lao Tzu means by subtraction, and it is why none of this is poverty. The 19th chapter again. Show the plain silk, lessen the self, have few desires. It is not a vow. It is a craft and it is the particular craft of the second half of a life. The first half is for gathering. Once you needed all of it, the spare room, the second car, the storage unit when you moved. None of that was wrong and none of it was wasted. But the second half has a different job and the job is setting things down one at a time until what is left is what you actually live with. This is what slow living means when the phrase is not being sold to you. Not a style of house. A house with few enough things in it that the days can be slow and simple living is not a look. It is simply fewer things asking for you. Walk back past the dining table. It can stay. Keep what you use and what you love and what still has a person at the other end of it. The rest are caps, and you are allowed to stop pushing the cart. So what do you actually do on your knees in that attic with the lid off and the late light on the tissue paper? Less than you think. And I have to warn you now that the first weeks will feel worse than the crate ever did. Here is the only thing I will ask of you, and it is small and it is harder than it sounds. This week, open the crate. Take out one thing, only one, and give it to the person it was really for, not in a parcel, not left in a bag by their door, in person in their kitchen with the story, the christening gown perhaps. You drive over on a Saturday, which you now have, and you sit at your daughter's small table and you take it out of its tissue. And you tell her that her grandmother sewed the buttons on the night before by lamplight because the ones it came with were too plain. That her brother screamed the whole way through his and she slept through hers. That her father held her so carefully on the steps afterwards that he would not let anyone else take a photograph. She may not want the gown. She will want the story. And the story was never in the crate. It was in you, and it has been waiting forty years to be told in a kitchen. Or, if there is nobody the thing was really for, let it go. Give the plates to someone setting up their first home. Let the school reports go into the fire. You will find that most of what you kept, you kept for the story, and the story does not need the object once it has been told. That is all. One thing. Not the whole crate, not the whole attic, not a weekend of bin bags and a plan with columns. One thing given by hand. Now the part nobody puts in the brochure and it matters more than the gown. The first weeks feel worse. Nobody tells you this. The gap on the shelf where the thing used to be is loud. You walk past it and it seems to ask a question. You wake in the night, and wonder whether you should have kept the plates after all. Whether your mother would be hurt. Whether you have given away something you cannot get back. Guilt comes to visit, and it stays longer than it was asked. That is not a sign you have done something wrong. It is what happens when a thing that was holding a part of your life for you stops holding it, and you have to hold it yourself for a while. The crate was carrying 40 years so that you did not have to. Now you are carrying them and they are heavier in the hands than in the attic and lighter in the end. Lao Tzu said sparing is being ready early. You are not only making room in a house, you are making yourself ready for the phone call from across the ocean, for the Saturday lunch, for a life that is lighter and slower than the one you have been maintaining. Nothing is going to arrive because you let the plates go. There is no reward waiting behind the empty shelf. What changes is only this. The house asks less of you, and so there is more of you left over for whoever is actually in front of you. Give it a month. The loud gap goes quiet. The guilt gets bored and leaves. And one afternoon you realize you have not thought about the shelf in a week, which is how you will know the thing has really been set down. And one afternoon, a month or so on, you will climb the ladder again. and find out which one thing in that crate was never going anywhere. It is late afternoon again, and the same light is coming through the small window under the roof, and the dust is turning in it the way it always has. You are on your knees in the same place. The crate is open. It is nearly empty now. The gown is at your daughter's, hanging in a wardrobe in a small house, with a story that she has already told to her own child. The plates went to a young couple from down the road who had four between them. The school reports went into the fire on a cold night, one at a time, and you read each one aloud before it went, and laughed more than you expected. One thing is left. The small shoe scuffed at the toe. You pick it up and turn it over, and you do not put it back in the crate. You set it on the windowsill in the light, where you will see it every time you come up here. That one you are keeping, and you know exactly why, and that is the difference. Then the five, all of them turned. Your Saturdays, one of them spent at a small kitchen table with a gown and tissue paper, a quiet heart which barely noticed when the car next door was replaced with another. The readiness to go, and a suitcase that is half-packed at the bottom of the wardrobe, just in case the phone rings from across the ocean. Your children, who got the stories instead of the caps. And enough, which was here all along and is here now, in this light, in this attic. You go down the ladder. Below you the house is quiet and it is the good kind of quiet now. There is an afternoon ahead of you with nothing in it that needs you. No gutters, no second car. Just the day plain, the way silk is plain, before anybody has asked it to be anything. That is all slow living ever was. Before you go, tell me one thing in the comments. Which room would you empty first? One word is plenty. Attic. Garage. Spare room. I read them all, and I suspect a good many will name a room whose door you have not opened in years. These are slow essays on the Tao, on Zen, and on the second half of a life from a channel called The Empty Boat. Today the empty thing was a crate, and it turned out to have your children in it. Come back and sit with us the next time the house goes quiet. Go gently. The windowsill never needed more than one thing on it, and this afternoon neither do you.