Not Taking It Personally

A remark lands and something tightens. It might be a criticism, a tone, a message left unanswered, a decision that went the other way. Whatever the size of it, the reaction usually outruns the event.

The Tao Te Ching has two chapters that take this apart from different ends. Chapter 70 is about being misunderstood, and it was written by someone with a complaint. Chapter 22 is about the position that removes the sting in the first place.

The Book Is Not Above This

It is worth noticing that chapter 70 is, plainly, a grievance. "It is very easy to comprehend my teachings and to put them into practice. Yet there is no one in the world who is able either to comprehend, or to practise them" (chapter 70, C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905). And then, unmistakably: "Those who know Me are few."

That candour is useful. A book that never admitted to being stung by being misread would be worth less on this subject. Something is being felt here, and it is not hidden.

What It Does With It

The move comes at the end: "the Holy Man wears coarse garments, but carries a jewel in his bosom."

Two things are being separated. What is on the outside — plain, unimpressive, easy to pass over — and what is actually there. The chapter does not resolve the misunderstanding, and it does not set out to correct anyone. It simply declines to make the outside match, and stops treating the mismatch as an emergency.

That is the practical content. Most of the work of not taking something personally is not talking yourself out of the hurt. It is noticing that another person's reading of you is a thing they made, largely out of materials you did not supply, and that it does not have jurisdiction over what is actually in you.

From the Tao

The Holy Man wears coarse garments, but carries a jewel in his bosom. — Tao Te Ching, chapter 70 (C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905)

Where the Sting Is Manufactured

Chapter 22 works the other end, and it reads almost like a list of removals: "Not pushing himself forward he will become enlightened; not asserting himself he will become distinguished; not boasting of himself he will acquire merit; not approving himself he will endure" (chapter 22, Dwight Goddard, 1919).

Every item is a form of maintaining a position about oneself. And that is the connection worth making: a remark hurts in proportion to what it contradicts. If nothing is being held up, there is much less for a comment to knock against. The pain of being underestimated requires an estimate to be defended.

This is not a claim that criticism stops registering. Some of it is accurate, and the accurate kind is supposed to register. It is a claim about the extra — the part that goes on running for three days afterwards, which is almost always about the account of yourself the remark disturbed rather than the remark.

The Quarrel Nobody Can Have With You

Chapter 22 puts the result in a single line: "Forasmuch as he will not quarrel, the world will not quarrel with him."

Read as a promise about other people it is plainly too optimistic — the world quarrels with plenty of people who never asked for it. Read as a description of what a quarrel requires, it is exact. A quarrel needs two positions being defended. Decline the second one and what is left is somebody expressing a view, which is a much smaller event and usually a shorter one.

Not Indifference

None of this is a case for not caring what anyone thinks. That posture is usually its own kind of defence, and it costs you the useful half of criticism along with the rest.

The distinction the chapters keep drawing is between the content of a remark and the standing of the person hearing it. The content may be right, wrong, or careless, and is worth weighing on its own terms. The standing was never in the remark's gift. What chapter 70 keeps in the coarse garment is not a defence against being misread. It is simply the thing that was there before the misreading and remains there after.