Abandon learnedness, and you have no vexation. The "yes" compared with the "yea," how little do they differ! But the good compared with the bad, how much do they differ!
What the people dread cannot be dreadless! How great is their desolation. Alas! it has not yet reached its limit.
The multitude of men are happy, so happy, as though celebrating a great feast. They are as though in springtime ascending a tower. I alone remain quiet, alas! like one that has not yet received an encouraging omen. I am like unto a babe that does not yet smile.
Forlorn am I, O, so forlorn! It appears that I have no place whither I may return home.
The multitude of men all have plenty and I alone appear empty. Alas! I am a man whose heart is foolish.
Ignorant am I, O, so ignorant! Common people are bright, so bright, I alone am dull.
Common people are smart, so smart, I alone am confused, so confused.
Desolate am I, alas! like the sea. Adrift, alas! like one who has no place where to stay.
The multitude of men all possess usefulness. I alone am awkward and a rustic too. I alone differ from others, but I prize seeking sustenance from our mother.
Translation: Paul Carus, 1898 (public domain)
Sit With This
When you step back from what everyone around you is chasing, where do you feel out of step or alone — and can you sense, underneath the drift, anything quietly holding you?
A Practice
If you are feeling out of step lately, try naming it plainly to yourself, without fixing it — 'I feel adrift right now' — and then notice one thing that still holds you steady, however small. And if the drift is heavy, let naming it be the first step toward telling someone you trust.
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Western Commentary
After nineteen verses of calm, impersonal teaching, this one suddenly turns into a voice — alone, exposed, almost confessing. Everyone else seems to be at the feast, it says, warm and satisfied and sure; the speaker alone feels listless, unsmiling, homeless, as though he has lost everything the others have. It is a rare, openly human passage — the sage himself admitting how it can feel to be out of step with the world.
There is a particular loneliness that comes with stepping off the track everyone else is running on. When you stop chasing what the crowd chases — the louder pleasures, the visible wins, the full banquet of getting and having — you can find yourself feeling like the only person not at the party. Everyone else looks bright, quick, sure of their purpose; you feel dull, slow, adrift, even a little foolish. The verse does not rush past this or dress it up. It is the rare moment the book admits, plainly, that the quiet path has a cost, and that the cost is sometimes felt as a kind of homelessness.
And it stays in that feeling longer than we might expect, refusing to resolve it too quickly — the speaker adrift as on the open sea, with nowhere to rest. If you have ever felt that — unmoored, out of step, dull among the bright — the verse is keeping you company in it rather than correcting you out of it. It is worth saying gently, too, that there is a point where this kind of drift stops being the solitude of the path and becomes a heavier isolation; and if that is where you are, reaching out — to a friend, to someone who can help you carry it — is not a failure of the way but part of it. The verse is honest that the feeling is real. It does not ask you to face it utterly alone.
What keeps the verse from collapsing into despair is its last, quiet line: the speaker is different from everyone else, yes — but what he prizes is the nourishing mother. The drifting one is not actually adrift. He is held, the way an infant is held by its mother, by the Tao itself — nourished by something the banquet cannot serve and the bright crowd has not noticed they are missing. The dullness, seen this way, is not emptiness; it is the look of someone who has let go of the frantic brightness and is being fed from a deeper, quieter source. You can be out of step with the whole world, the verse says, and still be exactly where you are held.