In the Zhuangzi (say "jwahng-dzuh"), a ruler watches his cook butcher an ox with a knife that has lasted nineteen years and thousands of carcasses, still sharp as new. Ordinary cooks hack through bone and dull a blade every month. This cook doesn't hack. He follows the natural seams of the joint, the spaces already built into the animal, and lets the blade travel through what's already open. At the harder joints, he says, he slows down, watches closely, and moves carefully, not carelessly. The ruler's own conclusion afterward wasn't about butchery. He said he'd learned something about nourishing his own life. Most of a morning is spent forcing solutions through wherever they don't naturally go: the reply hammered out under pressure, the schedule jammed instead of resequenced. Pick one ordinary task today and feel for its actual joints, the place it already wants to open, before you push.