The Courge to Be Permeable

By: Cheng Tong - Sep 08, 2026

 

We had been sitting in comfortable silence for about thirty minutes. At not even five feet tall, she was a peanut of a woman, resting quietly in her wheelchair while I towered beside her. Together, we watched with great amusement as squirrels chased each other up and around the bark of the trees just outside her window. Occasionally, she would turn to look up at me, gently pat my forearm, and resume watching the world outside.

Without breaking her gaze from the glass, she finally spoke. “You should bring your wife with you sometime.”

I smiled and told her that I had no wife; I was divorced. She turned her head, raised a single eyebrow, and offered a questioning, “Oh?”

Leaning in slightly, I asked, “Why, are you interested?”

With the faintest suggestion of a smirk, she replied, “You should be careful what you ask me. I might say yes.”

Four months later, just shy of her one-hundredth birthday, she suffered a stroke and died. Yet, I remember the precise cadence of her voice, the quiet humor of that morning, and the warmth of her hand as if it were yesterday.  Her funeral remembrance card is on my meditation room altar, and I think of her every day even after six years. I carry her memory, but I carry it without pain, because I do not fight the reality of her death.

When people first approach Daoist or Zen practice, they often come looking for an anesthetic. They carry a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be detached, assuming that stepping into the role of the observer means forging a heavy shield. They want a way to walk through the chaotic “red dust” of this world comfortably numb, insulated from the agony of aging, illness, and loss. Spiritual literature often feeds this illusion, painting enlightenment as a distant temple at the top of a misty mountain, where an untouchable sage floats cleanly above the messy reality of human suffering.

But I have climbed the steep stone steps to that temple, and I know exactly what it takes to walk back down them. The true work does not happen in the clouds; it happens in the mud.

True detachment is not the numbing of the heart. It is the radical, terrifying surrender of the armor protecting your ego. When you stop fighting the current of reality and release the frantic need to control outcomes, you do not lose your emotions—you finally give yourself permission to feel them completely. You choose to live in reality, which means choosing to love a friend you know is going to die, without trying to change the inevitable.

Sitting in her hospice room required an entirely permeable heart. An armored mind, anxious about her impending death or desperate to maintain a clinical, professional distance, could never have shared thirty minutes of comfortable silence, let alone a mischievous joke at the edge of the abyss. By dropping our defenses, we allow the universe to move through us freely. We embrace the vibrant joy of a shared afternoon by a window, and we fully accept the crushing sorrow of the empty room four months later.

If living authentically in the Great Dao means water eventually rises to our eyes, we do not build a dam. We simply let it flow. The tears are not a failure of detachment; they are the absolute proof that our vessel is finally open. We learn to carry the profound weight of our destinies, and the memories of those we have loved, without the friction of pain. We hold them simply, completely, and without resistance, allowing the mud to settle and the heart to remain clear.