The Mother of All Things — Keep to the Mother
This chapter treats the Tao as a "mother" from which everything else, including a person's own self, can be traced back, and argues that returning attention to that source is what keeps a person safe for life.
Laozi calls the beginning of the world its mother (天下有始，以為天下母); having found the mother, one can thereby know her children (the ten thousand things), and having known the children, one can return to hold fast to the mother — a genealogical image that treats every specific thing in experience as traceable back to a single formless origin. He promises a person who does this will meet no danger for the rest of their life, then gives a compact instruction for practice: close the openings, shut the doors (塞其兌，閉其門) — commonly read as reducing external sensory and desirous engagement — and one's whole life will be free of overexertion; do the opposite, and one's whole life will be beyond saving. The chapter closes with two more of the text's famous compressed definitions: seeing the small is called clarity (見小曰明), and holding to softness is called strength (守柔曰強) — instructing the reader to use the outer light of perception but turn it back inward, returning to clarity rather than exposing oneself to calamity through unchecked outward reach.
Seeing the small is called clarity; holding to softness is called strength.
Tao Te Ching