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The story below isn’t mine. Alan Watts tells it in one of his lectures, and I’m just passing it along. If you’d rather hear him tell it:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to sympathize. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The whole process of nature is integrated and immensely complex, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad. You never know what a misfortune will lead to. You never know what good fortune will cost you.
I keep it around as a reminder, whenever I’m in a bad situation, or even a very good one.
Maybe, in practice
I told this story to a colleague once. He was nervous about where software was heading, the usual worries everyone has lately with AI coming for jobs 🙂. The farmer felt like the right thing to hand him.
A while later, circumstances meant he had to leave the company we were both at. When it happened, I told him roughly what the farmer would have: take it as a positive, take some time to relax, point yourself at whatever comes next.
A couple of weeks later, he sent me this.
He ended up in a much better place than the one we left, and figured the whole thing had worked out.
You only really see it looking back. Steve Jobs said it better, in his 2005 Stanford commencement address:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.