Inner Nature and "just friends"

I've just finished reading "Tao of Pooh." What struck me as being particularly enlightening considering my recent perdicament in my personal life was the parable of the gnarly old tree.

A man has on his land a huge old tree with knotted wood. It is so huge that he wishes he could cut it down to use as lumber, but because it is so gnarled and knotted it would make terrible lumber and would be too hard to cut down. The man is very disgruntled because of what he sees as a useless tree. But the Taoist looks at the tree for all of the value it has outside of being potential lumber. It is unmoveable and therefore a wonderful testiment to nature, it produces shade in the hot summer, and bares fruit.

Basically you only see something as valueless when you are trying to force it to be something it is not, when you are not respecting it's Inner Nature. Hoff applied this to respecting one's own Inner Nature and therfore learning where you "belong" (he does of course discuss changing one's self for the better in later chapters so don't fear he's advocating a caste system). But I think in keeping with the parable...we must respect other's Inner Natures.

I was trying to make The Man that I was interested in something he was not (namely interested in me) I was seeing him as having value to me only as a potential new boyfriend or rebound relationship. He will never be one of those things for me, but this doens't make him a bad guy, but he has been relegated to the "just friends" category and that has an extreme amount of value in itself. Maybe it's not particularly "Inner Nature" in the Taoist sense, but I have had a enormous peace of mind since I realized that and have noticed a change in my attitude and interactions with The Man.