Parable of Perhaps

My town has what is called a Transfer station where residents can bring their home trash and recyclable materials to be collected for proper disposal. This is one chore that I actually look forward to every week because it gives me an opportunity to stop and peruse the on-site Book Swap Shack. It is typically stocked with an eclectic mix of adult and children’s books that reflects the diverse reading habits of our small community.

I have picked up – and dropped off –  many books over the years in that messy little book shack and I have discovered topics and titles that have served to send my mind wandering off in interesting and unplanned directions.

One such book I picked up last year,  “The Wheel of Life and Death” by Philip Kapleau, combined historical writings of Eastern and Western religious literature to examine how death, if viewed as an extension of life, can become a joyous occasion.

The book explains that our past actions influence not only our present life, but also our future death; therefore life and death are interrelated and desiring a good death highlights the importance of living a good life. With this in mind, the author explains that practices such as suicide, euthanasia, and pain-doping are obstacles to achieving the good death.

The book provides practical guidance about hospices, organ donation, living wills and funerals – along with helpful advice on meditations for the dying, ways of consoling the bereaved and checklists of things to do following a death.

The parts of the book that I found most appealing, however, were the supporting stories and perspectives on life that conveyed the wisdom of numerous authors, including Tolstoy, Socrates, and Ghandi.

One such story that I call the Parable of Perhaps is about a farmer who is trying to understand the meaning behind a series of sudden events that happen to him. I often think about the lesson of this parable whenever I experience unexpected misfortune or sudden good luck in my life.

Parable of Perhaps

A man’s horse broke out of his barn and ran away during the night. His neighbors came over to console him saying that it was very unfortunate he lost his horse. The farmer said “Maybe”.

The next day the farmer’s horse returned bringing with him seven wild horses. His neighbors then said how very lucky he was to gain seven more horses for his farm. The farmer said “Maybe”.

On the following day his son tried to ride one of the new wild horses and was thrown and broke his leg. “O how awful!” cried his neighbors. “Maybe” answered the farmer.

The next week soldiers came to conscript the young men of the village to fight in a war but the farmer’s son was not taken because his leg was broken. “How wonderful for you!” said the neighbors. “maybe”, said the farmer.

The lesson is that we cannot know the outcome of the things we experience in this life and whether they will turn out good or bad or both. What appears “good” to us today may be the cause of some future misfortune. In the same way, we may look back tomorrow with appreciation at something “bad” that happened to us today.

To illustrate, I can relate a series of events from my own life. When I went off to College I was a quiet boy lacking in confidence as I took my first steps toward independence. I became attracted to a beautiful girl who I met in one of my classes but I felt that she was out of my league and would never be interested in going out with the likes of me. Over the course of time I noticed that her and her friends were particularly interested in the members of a certain on-campus fraternity and they encouraged – even dared me to pledge the fraternity.

I really didn’t want to join this particular fraternity, as it had a reputation for harsh hazing practices and crazy campus stunts, but I signed up to pledge anyway, hoping it would encourage Miss-Out-of-My-League to look my way.

The hazing that occurred over the two week pledging period was even worse than I had imagined, but I managed to survive the ordeal and to my great excitement also to win the first of several dates with that prized girl.

I approached the first date with nervous anticipation and high expectations but it didn’t take me very long to notice that her beauty did not extend to her personality. It became obvious to me fairly quickly that she was self-centered, shallow and somewhat mean-spirited. I was not surprised or disappointed when she broke up with me after a couple weeks of dating.

I joined the fraternity for the wrong reasons, but when I think back on it I realize that my involvement with the club had the unintended effects of helping me to become more social and to gain the self-confidence that I was lacking – so much so that I eventually rose to become President of the Fraternity where I used my position to begin to modify some of those “harsh” hazing practices.

But even more important, my membership in the Fraternity made it possible for me to meet a Sorority girl, one who was beautiful both inside and out, who would eventually become my wife and the mother of my children.

So, in retrospect, the decision to join the Fraternity that I thought would be a “bad” experience, turned out to be good not because it won me a date with the girl (which turned out to be “bad”) but  because it helped me to gain confidence and lifetime friends and started me down the path that led to the true girl for me.

Some Eastern Religious philosophies teach that assigning events in our lives to tags like “good’ or “bad” is a prescription for suffering because these ideas just cause us to fear events that may never happen in the future or lead us to disappointment when events do not bring us expected good fortune.

That is why Mindfulness meditation practices instruct practitioners to look at events in their lives objectively and unemotionally as neither good or bad. If we can detach ourselves from these tags then we can better focus on the moment and not expend energy wishing things were different or worrying about events whose outcomes can not be known.

Taking this approach to its logical conclusion, we should also consider death, not as the  ultimate “bad” event in our life and something to be feared – because we cannot know what lies on the other side. Maybe it will be good…