The Carpenter and the Crooked Tree
Short story about the part of you that doesn't fit.
The oak at the bend was enormous and completely useless. Twisted trunk, grain running three ways.
"Bad wood," the master carpenter said as they passed it.
"Then why is it the biggest tree in the valley?"
The master stopped walking, which he never did on a working morning. "Because it is bad wood."
The apprentice did the arithmetic slowly. The pines went for scaffolding at forty years. The good oaks became beams at eighty. The cherry went whenever anyone married.
The useless tree had stood two hundred years. It was the only shade on the road, and the place people meant when they said, meet me at the tree.
Years later, asked the same question at the same bend, the apprentice — old now — gave the short answer:
"Be careful what you make yourself excellent for."
Perhaps the part of you that doesn't fit is the part you were never meant to cut away.
Ohananda.com
Tao Te Ching ch. 11; Zhuangzi, “The Useless Tree”
Inspired by the Taoist theme of useful uselessness — chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching and the crooked-tree passages in the Zhuangzi. This retelling is Ohananda's own.
Zhuangzi tells of a tree too gnarled to be worth cutting — and therefore left to grow enormous. A tree that can be made into beams gets made into beams.
Taoism is not praising laziness. It is warning about optimisation: a life shaped entirely around being useful to others may get exactly what it asks for.
What have you made yourself useful for — and did you ever choose it?
