The Game of Life
October 18, 2009
There are occasions when we find ourselves in situations we do not like and might wish were not happening.
There is a Taoist story I love. It goes….
=== start
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.
“Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.
“We’ll see,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.
“How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“We’ll see,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“We’ll see,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
“We’ll see” said the farmer.
=== end
The concepts “good” and “bad” are relative and arbitrary. What might be good for someone might be bad for someone else. Somethings are good for you in some ways and bad for you in others. Bad habits can be positive in certain contexts. It is often considered that procrastination is bad. At the same time America is in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Maybe we could learn to use proscrastination to avoid fatty snack food (“I might get around to having that donut later”). We generally think of phobias as bad things. Yet people with phobias, at some point in their lives, learned in a single experience, something so deeply that it changed their lives from that point forward. If in a single experience someone learns to be afraid of spiders, we call that a phobia. If tin a single experience someone learns they have an amazing gift for business or tennis or drawing or writing or anything, we don’t have a word for that.
Every unpleasant situation has within it the seeds of something good, even if in the moment, we can not see what the good is. It’s there.
The most important thing is that although we may not like every situation we’re in, but it’s critically important to like yourself in your situations.
K
