Tao Te Ching, Verse 13

“Being honored is a disgrace as it causes bondage.
Being valued will cause great discomfort to the body.

How can it be said that being honored is a disgrace?
Honor is based on subserviency.
Obtaining it causes bondage; losing it causes bondage.
That's how it can be said that being honored is a disgrace as it causes bondage.

How can it be said that being valued will cause great discomfort to the body?
My own experiences in life have caused me to have anxiety about how I should act.
My own experiences in life have shown me that my body can be easily defeated.
Without a body, what would I have?

That anxiety, therefore, causes emphasis on the actions of the body and how it relates to the rest of the world.
That would seem to make us be willing to adapt to the world.
It's through the love of the way my body can act in the world that I am willing to repeatedly change along with the world.”
(Tao Te Ching, Verse 13, Nina Correa Translation)

I’ll be honest, when I began this blog I wasn’t completely certain what I wanted to do with it. I love the Tao and I wanted to discuss it. Perhaps I wanted to explicate it and explore the various translations; it was all very ethereal in my mind when I began. That probably explains why I feel somewhat disappointed with the 2010 posts. They’re lacking something – they lack depth. It’s funny; I turned forty in 2010 but I don’t feel any wiser now than I did a decade ago. If anything, I feel like I know even less now. Maybe that’s a good thing. Over the past couple of decades, I’ve become much less arrogant. I used to think that I knew things; now I’m not as sure. Humility is definitely something worth pursuing. I think that I need a different approach this year; an approach that is more consistent with the Tao. I try to figure this out more adequately before I write the next post.

I’ll leave you, as always, with Siji Tzu’s commentary:
“You are in everything. Everything is in you. Create hope and fear and you throw away the Dao. Create happiness and sorrow and you will collapse. Keep your feet on the ground. Love everything as you love yourself. Then everything is within your reach.”