The man who sang at his wife's funeral

A man's wife dies and he sits on the floor with his legs splayed out, banging a basin and singing.

His best friend walks in and can't believe it. You lived with her, he says, you raised children with her, you grew old together. Not crying is bad enough. Singing is obscene.

Zhuangzi puts down the basin. He says: when she first died, I grieved like anyone. Then I looked at what had actually happened. Before she was born she had no life, no body, no breath. She came out of that, in the middle of everything, into a body, into a life. Now she's gone back. She's lying quietly in a room the size of everything, sleeping between heaven and earth, and if I follow her around weeping, that's me not understanding where she's gone.

Huizi went home. Nobody knows what he said on the way.

Most people hear that story as coldness. What I see is somebody who let the grief run its whole length instead of stopping it halfway and storing the rest in his shoulders.

You learn early that crying is embarrassing, so the sadness goes underground and comes back as a stomach thing, a jaw thing, a three a.m. thing. Suppressed grief doesn't disperse. It relocates.

MOJOWAY is built around letting a feeling finish its sentence before you act on it. Self-awareness isn't the absence of the feeling. It's knowing where you'd rather it went.