Trust what comes next - Taoïsm

Welcome to Life Wisdom. I am Chen Li, author of the blog Word of Taoism on Substack and you're listening to my podcast. Some gestures in ordinary life are so modest that we hardly notice them and yet they quietly uphold much of what keeps us going. A mother at the end of a long day offers perhaps one of the simplest images of this. The children have been difficult, workers warn her out and almost nothing has gone the way she hoped. She could rush through bedtime, switch off the light, close the door and finally allow herself a little rest. No one would blame her. Most likely no one would even notice and yet she takes her time. She listens to the tangled story her son tells her about his day. She answers a question he has already asked ten times. She pulls the blanket up, kisses his forehead and leaves the door slightly open because she knows that is how he falls asleep most peacefully. She does not know what he will remember of this moment. She does not know what kind of adult he will become. She cannot even be sure that all these patient evenings repeated through tiredness will leave any lasting mark in him. She does not know whether anything she gives tonight will truly settle in his memory, in his heart, in the way he will one day move through the world. And still evening after evening despite the weariness, despite the doubts, despite the silence into which most of her gestures disappear. She goes on. What is it that keeps her going? It is not only duty, it is not only love, though love is clearly at the center of everything. Something quieter is at work within her, something deeper and less immediately visible, a way of inwardly consenting to what is good, of remaining faithful to what matters, of continuing to offer what she can without demanding to see the fruit of it right away. Each evening she consents to these small acts without knowing what will come of them, as though a very humble, very quiet voice will whispering that they are worth doing anyway. In one form or another, all of us know this inner disposition. Depending on the day and the circumstances, we give it different names. We speak of optimism, we speak of trust, we speak of hope. We often use these words as though they meant the same thing, but they do not. They are deeply connected, like the strands of a single cord. And together they allow us to keep doing what is right, even when nothing guarantees that our actions will bear immediate fruit. It is this inner cord I would like to reflect on here. These three strands that support one another take turns sustaining us and answer one another. Above all the last of them, that quiet hope which remains when everything else grows dim and which keeps alive in us the possibility of continuing. But before going further we need to clear up an old misunderstanding, one that has done real harm to one of the most precious words in our inner life. We too often confuse optimism with naivety. Naivety means failing to see the difficulty. It moves through the world with a kind of blind innocence, trusting that things will turn out well simply because it has not yet reckoned with what could go wrong. It rests on a misreading of reality, which is why it remains so fragile. The moment life reminds it of its harshness, it shatters, leaving the person who relied on it with nothing solid to stand on. Lucid optimism is something entirely different. It does not close its eyes to fatigue, to failure, to resistance, to injustice, or even to its own limits. It takes no shelter in illusion. It does not tell itself comforting stories. It does not assume that everything will necessarily work out in the end. But precisely because it looks reality in the face, it is able to make a choice that has real weight, to remain oriented toward what is still worth serving, toward what can still be preserved, toward the good that can still be done in the heart of uncertainty. Let us return to our mother. If she were naivety, she would imagine that loving a child is enough to protect him from everything. That life will somehow unfold as it should. That the care she gives today will guarantee tomorrow's balance. But she is not naïve. She knows perfectly well that she will sometimes get things wrong. She knows there will be moments when she falls short. Moments she misses things she cannot foresee or repair. She knows her son will have his share of sorrow, confusion, perhaps even distance, and that life will not spare him. Yet this awareness of her limits does not turn her away from her gesture. If anything, it makes the gesture more true. It is precisely because she knows all this that she keeps reading the bedtime story. She keeps holding his hand when he is afraid. She keeps searching for the right words when they come and keeps offering within the bounds of her strength the presence she has to give. That is what lucid optimism looks like. Not an easy belief in a favorable future, but an inward decision often silent to keep doing what deserves to be done. It does not arise from weakness of mind but from a form of courage. It does not deny reality. It accepts reality without allowing it to have the final word. We often forget that this kind of optimism has a very concrete virtue. It sets us in motion. It is more than a pleasant disposition or an encouraging way of looking at things. It becomes a practical force, a modest yet decisive energy that moves us to act precisely when nothing is assured. We need only notice what quietly holds our world together each day. A parent who takes time for a story at a child's bedside. A teacher who carefully prepares a lesson without knowing what any student will retain. A doctor who long after the day should have ended still listens to one last concern. Someone who answers harshness with gentleness instead of returning it. A gardener who plants a tree whose full shade he will never know. All these gestures have something in common. They are made without certainty. Without any guarantee of result and still they are made. Those who make them are not fools. They know the child may forget the story. They know the student may never read the recommended pages. They know the patient may leave carrying other worries. That the other person's harshness may not soften. That the tree may take decades to give what it promises and yet they act all the same because they have made a choice deeper than the expectation of measurable results. They have chosen to do what is right, what is good, what is meaningful in itself, even if nothing ever comes back to them directly. That in the end is what active optimism is. It is less a belief that everything will work out than a willingness to keep doing what deserves to be done because some gestures are worth making for their own sake regardless of whether they are seen, rewarded or even remembered. Our mother takes part in this quiet movement. Perhaps without knowing it she belongs to that silent multitude of women and men who help keep something livable and good alive in the world through ordinary acts. Repeated and almost always unseen. And these acts though they pass unnoticed really do change lives. They alter trajectories. They soften childhoods. They transform the way people learn to love. They prepare future for and they quietly weave the fabric of what makes the world a little more habitable. This is how lucid optimism sustains so much real good. It does not always shine, but it puts its hands to the work. And yet there comes an evening when the mother closes the bedroom door and no longer feels any of that inner readiness. This is not simply physical tiredness, the kind that follows a long day. It is a duller, deeper weariness as though something in her had stopped responding. Her son was difficult today just as he was yesterday. What she thought she had been passing on seems to have vanished into thin air. Or perhaps she herself has simply given too much for too long without receiving the smallest sign that any of it has taken root. So she sits down and for the first time in a long while a question passes through her. Does any of this really matter? Many people know that fatigue. It comes to the parent who has given and given for years. It comes to the artist working in obscurity, unsure whether the work reaches anyone. It comes to the one caring for a loved one and no longer receiving any visible sign in return. It comes to all those who persevere in doing good while the good seems to yield no evidence of itself. This weariness should not be mistaken for moral failure. It does not mean that we have become less generous or less brave. It says something deeply human and deeply true. Optimism even lucid optimism, even noble optimism cannot always carry us by itself. It needs to be sustained by something deeper. Optimism looks ahead. It turns toward the good that may still come. Toward the gestures we can still make. Toward whatever measure of light it is not yet absurd to serve. However, there are moments when looking ahead is no longer enough. Reality weighs too heavily. The evidence is missing. The signs are unclear. And what was carrying us only yesterday can no longer lift us. Then another force has to take over. Not to replace optimism but to nourish it from below. From deeper ground, from a memory older than the impulse of the moment. We know this other force too. It has another name. We call it trust. Unlike optimism, trust does not first turn toward what is coming. It is rooted in what has already been lived through. It does not say this will go well. It says something quieter. I have already seen in my life that not everything is in vain. I have already seen that certain gestures long silent do eventually reach someone. I have already been given proof that time works more deeply than I imagined. If our mother pauses for a moment and breathes, perhaps she can remember. She can remember that summer evening when, at the dinner table, her son suddenly said something so gentle, so unexpectedly just that she understood in an instant he had heard far more than she thought. She can remember the evening when she was ill and depleted, with no patience left for anything. And it was her son who came and laid his small, clumsy hand on her forehead. She can remember all those tiny returns, those almost imperceptible signs, that showed her her gestures had not been lost. That is where trust takes root. In the memory of fruit already glimpsed, in the recognition of what has held, in the recollection of those moments when life answered more gently than we expected. It promises nothing about tonight. It does not guarantee that tomorrow will be easier. It does not magically turn hardship into clarity, but it whispers something wider. I have already seen time do its work. I have already seen words that seem lost return in another form. I have already seen the good bear fruit, sometimes by hidden paths, sometimes in ways I never could have foreseen. This is how trust works in many areas of life. A teacher draws on it when he remembers former students returning years later to thank him for words he thought they had forgotten. A caregiver draws on it when she thinks of those who came through illness better than she dared hope. A faithful friend draws on it when he remembers all that friendship has already preserved in him through dark times. Trust is a reserve patiently built up over time, a spring that fills in quiet seasons, and that we can come back to when the days grow hard. It makes little noise, but it restores. It puts meaning back into a gesture that had begun to empty out. Sometimes it allows us to place our hand once more on a door handle. We thought we no longer had the strength to turn, and yet even trust has its limits. There are moments in some lives when memory itself is no longer enough. The trial becomes too vast, too bear, too radical. What we have already lived through has not prepared us for what is now before us. Or the wounds come so quickly, so densely, that the reserves built up over years suddenly feel thin and powerless. The memories are still there, of course, but they lose their nourishing force. They remain, and yet they no longer illuminate. We look to them for support, and find only a light to faint for the night we are in. This can happen after a bereavement, after a deep betrayal, after a long illness, after a string of failures, none of which alone would have broken us, but whose repetition has hollowed out awareness that seems bottomless. In such moments, even trust begins to waver, not because it was false, but because what we are being asked to carry exceeds the older forms of our endurance. It is then that something appears which seems poorer on the surface, and yet may be more stubborn than anything else in us. A small flame that depends neither on favourable expectations nor on accumulated proofs, and that somehow keeps burning deep within. That flame is what we call hope. Hope is not optimism. It predicts nothing, guarantees nothing, and does not declare that tomorrow will be better. Nor is it trust because it no longer leans, or no longer leans first, on the memory of what has already sustained us. It holds on in a bearer way. It remains without decisive argument, without demonstration, without clear promise. It is that secret inward orientation that keeps turning toward a possible good, while no longer quite knowing how to name it, or why it still insists on making room for it. Hope does not speak loudly. It seeks neither to convince nor to be admired. It does not light the whole room the way the bright impulses of better days can. It keeps watch quietly, like a small night light in a dark corner, and its mere persistence is enough to keep the darkness from having the last word. This is its beauty. As long as that small light remains on, something remains possible. Not necessarily what we had imagined. Not the precise outcome we would most like to see. Not a result we could write into a plan or a calendar, but an opening, however slight. A crack not entirely sealed. A future we can no longer picture clearly, and yet refuse to declare impossible. This discrete flame is doing immense work in us. It keeps alive what would otherwise close completely. It prevents the heart from hardening once and for all. Beneath the ash, it preserves the possibility of beginning again one day. Without promising anything, it protects the future capacity. to take up abandoned gestures, to reopen the door of a bedroom, to lay a hand on a fevered forehead, to rebuild what we thought was lost, or simply to love again even a little, where love had ceased to flow freely. Hope does not replace optimism. It quietly shelters it. It does not stand in for trust. It carries trust forward when memory no longer has the strength to sustain the present. It is like the ember kept under ash through the night, not to be admired, but so that the fire may be rekindled when morning comes. This is why quiet hope is so precious. Not because it is the most dazzling of the three, nor even the strongest in the ordinary sense, but because it is the most faithful. It does not shine much. It promises no victory. It does not make a spectacle of itself. It simply remains there, stubborn and gentle when everything else has faltered. It says almost nothing, and yet it keeps alive in us a sentence so simple, it is almost impossible to utter without damaging it. Whatever happens, I do not fully consent to turn away from what could still be good. And that silent faithfulness folded into the depths of our lives, maybe one of the highest things a human being is capable of. Let us return one last time to our mother on some ordinary evening. She is perhaps rested, perhaps tired, perhaps somewhere between the two. She climbs the stairs, approaches her son's room, and prepares to perform for the thousandth time, perhaps the ordinary gestures her life is woven from. What holds her up in that moment is not one thing alone, but a wider inward alliance made up of several forces that sustain one another in turn. There is lucid optimism, which lets her sense that this moment matters even without any guarantee of return, and which moves her to offer her presence while knowing perfectly well that no gesture of love is ever assured of its effect. There is trust which sustains her over time by drawing on the memory of signs already received. Of all those small proofs that nothing she gives is ever entirely lost. And deeper still, there is quiet hope. That barely visible night light which remains let even on the darkest evenings and preserves in her the possibility of beginning again when nothing seems to justify it any longer. These three strands are not opposed to one another. They are meant to live together within us. Optimism sets us in motion. Trust sustains our steps when the road grows long. Hope keeps watch in the night when walking seems impossible. When one weakens the others take over and when all three seem on the verge of giving way, it is often hope, the smallest and the most tenacious, that remains long enough to prepare the return of the other two. Whatever place we hold in life, whether we are a parent, a caregiver, a teacher, a faithful friend, a companion to someone in need, or simply a human being patiently carrying out a work whose shape no one can yet see. We may need to learn this, not to measure too quickly the worth of a gesture by its immediate effect. Not everything bears fruit at once, not everything can be verified. Many essential things ripen in secret, in repetition, in patience, far from sight and far from noise. In the end, the real question may not be whether everything will succeed tonight. It may not even be whether it will one day be recognized. The question is humbler and more demanding than that is what I am about to do worth doing. And if the answer is yes, then perhaps it is enough simply to do it peacefully, faithfully, without unnecessary display. To keep lighting small lights, fragile and discreet even when they draw no notice remains one of the most beautiful things a human being can do. For the world is held together in no small part by all those who in the silence of their ordinary evenings go on doing what is theirs to do without always knowing what exactly it is they are saving. And the light you carry is one of those lights too. Thank you so much for listening to today's podcast and for your continued support for my work. You can follow me on Substack at Words of Taoism to continue your journey.