How was the week? A little bitter? Or was it sweet? Or maybe bitter-sweet?
Mine was just that, on about three different fronts.
What do you do when life gets unexpectedly complex?
My first desperate reaction is to try and define it and oversimplify it so I know what to do with it. That’s because I’m human and can only really understand a thing when it fits neatly into one of my stories.
We all do it, so we can tell ourselves something is good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. But I’ve noticed most of the time Life has very little interest in handing me easy definitions.
It’s like the ancient Taoist parable of the farmer and his horse ...
A farmer buys a horse, but then it runs away. His neighbor says, "Oh I’m so sorry. That's bad news." But the farmer says, "Good news, bad news, who can say?" A few days pass and the horse comes back and brings another horse with it. Now the farmer has two horses. “Ah, so it was actually good news,” says the neighbor. But the farmer says, “Good news, bad news, who can say?" The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it but then is thrown and badly breaks his leg. "So indeed it was bad news after all," says the neighbor. But in a week or so, the Emperor calls upon every able-bodied young man to go to war and the farmer's son is spared from going because of his broken leg. Good news? Bad news? Who can say?
You don't have be a deeply philosophical person to understand that from where we stand now, we don't know the end of the story we're living, even though we desperately want to, and often convince ourselves that we do. That’s just us writing stories of an unknown future. The truth is we don't know the twists and turns still to come.
And that's why from time to time, even I—the one who presses you every week to write yourself a better story—want to remind both of us to guard ourselves from falling too deeply into our stories.
We’re usually so immersed in them we forget they’re even there. And whenever anything happens we start writing what it means long before we should. It’s tale of the farmer over and over again. What his neighbor never grasped was the farmer was never at the mercy of uncontrollable events. His life was only ever at the mercy of his own chosen perspectives.
It’s not about the unexpected, the uninvited, or the unwanted. It’s about us. That may seem pithy, and I don’t mean for it to sound like it’s easy, but nevertheless, it is true.
Perhaps Shakespeare had heard the story of the farmer when he wrote, “there is nothing either good or bad, but that thinking makes it so.”
Or as Obi Wan might say, “You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
So on we go—all our stories in tow—into the unknown. I’ll tell you the one and only thing I know about the future …
For as long as you are here, no matter what happens next, if you truly want to, you can choose to build yourself a beautiful life.