The old man at the frontier

The worst thing that happened to you this year may be standing between you and something you can't see yet.

You didn't get the job. The project died in March. The person left. At the time it felt like a door closing, and you can probably still remember what you were wearing.

Near the northern frontier there lived an old man whose horse ran off. The neighbours came to console him. He said, how do you know this isn't good fortune.

Months later the horse came back, and it brought a fine horse from the north with it. The neighbours came to congratulate him. He said, how do you know this isn't misfortune.

His son liked riding the new horse and fell, and broke his leg. The neighbours came back to console him. He said, how do you know this isn't good fortune.

A year later the northern tribes came down and every able-bodied young man was called up. Nine out of ten did not come home. The son stayed behind because of the leg, and the two of them survived the war.

This story gets retold as a comfort, a nice thought for people having a bad week. There's something harder inside it.

Every one of those four moments, he refused to file the event under a verdict. He kept it open. Not because he was serene, but because he'd noticed that the filing was always premature.

You don't have the ending. You have a chapter, and it's the middle one.

MOJOWAY is where I practise leaving a verdict open. Being able to revise your own story later is most of what self-awareness is for.