Night 3 · Unfolding

Mushrooms from Steam

蒸成菌

乐出虚，蒸成菌。日夜相代乎前，而莫知其所萌。已乎，已乎！

Music comes out of empty hollows; steam turns into mushrooms. Day and night they replace each other before us, and no one knows where they sprout from. Enough, enough!

Zhuangzi, Chapter 2, “On the Equality of Things”

02 Tonight

11:58 p.m. What if Thursday goes badly? What if he was actually upset? What if the money doesn't stretch this month? Each what-if brings the next one with it, as if they had been waiting in line.

03 How the ancients saw it

In the same chapter, Zhuangzi makes a list of human moods: joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, wavering, fear, recklessness, indulgence, showing off, putting on airs. When the list is done, he offers two images.

The first: music comes out of empty hollows, the holes of a flute, the caves of a valley. The second: steam turns into mushrooms, which spring up wherever it is warm and damp.

Both images make one point. Nobody puts these moods into us. They grow out of conditions. Where there is a hollow, there is sound. Where there is damp, there are mushrooms.

Night is a dark, damp cellar. The body is tired, the room is quiet, and there is nothing else to hold your attention. What-ifs grow fast in those conditions. They look like information about tomorrow. Mostly they are information about tonight: you are tired, and it is dark.

There is some comfort in that. At midnight you don't have to argue with each what-if on its merits, any more than you would argue with a mushroom. It is something the damp produced. You can let it be that.

Zhuangzi goes on: day and night they replace each other before us, and no one knows where they sprout from. Then he writes two words, twice. “Enough, enough.”

There is no scolding in those words. Said aloud, they sound like one person telling another, quietly, that it's enough for tonight.

04 One line for the pillow

A what-if at midnight is weather. Let it pass overhead.

05 A quiet image to end on

A forest floor after rain. Overnight, mushrooms push up through the leaves. By noon the sun has dried the ground, and one by one they fold back into the earth.

Words of the night