Tao Te Ching Chapter 20: Being Different from the Vulgar

The most personal chapter in the Tao Te Ching — the sage from the inside, and it does not feel like winning. Abandon learning, it opens, and there will be no sorrow: what real difference separates 'yes' from 'yeah,' good from evil, that we should tremble over distinctions? Then the confession. The multitudes are merry, as if feasting at a great sacrifice, as if mounting a terrace in spring; I alone am inert, like an infant before its first smile, drifting as if with nowhere to return. Others have more than enough; I alone seem to have lost everything.

The self-portrait grows almost comic — I have the mind of a fool, so blank! Ordinary people are bright; I alone am dull. Ordinary people are sharp; I alone am muddled, calm as the ocean, ceaselessly drifting — before the last line quietly turns the whole lament inside out: I alone am different from others, in that I prize being nourished by the Mother. The emptiness that looked like poverty is intimacy with the source. Anyone whose growing stillness has made them feel out of step with a noisy world has a companion in this chapter.