The folktale about an old man and his horse.
One day, the horse ran away, and the villagers came over to express their regrets. “Who knows whether this is good or bad?” said the old man, shrugging. A few days later, the horse returned and brought along a herd of wild horses it had met. The neighbours came over again, this time to congratulate the old man. “Who knows whether this is good or bad?” He shrugged. Soon after, the old man’s son tried to tame one of the stallions, fell off it, and broke his bones. “So sorry, ” said the neighbours. “Who knows?” said the old man. Then war broke out, the army drafted all the healthy young men in the village, and only the old man kept his son because the boy was still bedridden. “Lucky you,” said one mother. “Who knows?” said the old man.
“Thus they show up in their disguises, the ups and downs of life, the turns of good and bad fortune…perhaps they disguise themselves to bring something out of us and that something is character, our true self, who we really are.”, Andreas Kluth.
Rather than using the measure of good or bad, waiting, being curious, delving deeper, brings character and then meaning. I suggest that when we live our lives on the plane of “good and bad, black and white”, those are the only possibilities we will find. So when we experience pain or other symptoms, to delve deeper we could ask: What’s really going on here? Why is this really happening? We can be too quick to judge and then we miss out on more information, more meaning. If something is happening over and over again or a symptom just won’t go away, ask yourself, What’s really going on here? Go deeper to another level of thinking and be curious. There is more meaning and richness of life waiting for you…
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
Rudyard Kipling