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How was the week? A little bitter? Or was it sweet? Or maybe bitter-sweet?

Mine was just that, on about three different fronts.


What do you do when life gets unexpectedly complex?


My first desperate reaction is to try and define it and oversimplify it so I know what to do with it. That\u2019s because I\u2019m human and can only really understand a thing when it fits neatly into one of my stories.


We all do it, so we can tell ourselves something is good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. But I\u2019ve noticed most of the time Life has very little interest in handing me easy definitions.


It\u2019s like the ancient Taoist parable of the farmer and his horse ...


A farmer buys a horse, but then it runs away. His neighbor says, "Oh I\u2019m so sorry. That's bad news." But the farmer says, "Good news, bad news, who can say?" A few days pass and the horse comes back and brings another horse with it. Now the farmer has two horses. \u201cAh, so it was actually good news,\u201d says the neighbor. But the farmer says, \u201cGood news, bad news, who can say?" The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it but then is thrown and badly breaks his leg. "So indeed it was bad news after all," says the neighbor. But in a week or so, the Emperor calls upon every able-bodied young man to go to war and the farmer's son is spared from going because of his broken leg. Good news? Bad news? Who can say?


You don't have be a deeply philosophical person to understand that from where we stand now, we don't know the end of the story we're living, even though we desperately want to, and often convince ourselves that we do. That\u2019s just us writing stories of an unknown future. The truth is we don't know the twists and turns still to come.


And that's why from time to time, even I\u2014the one who presses you every week to write yourself a better story\u2014want to remind both of us to guard ourselves from falling too deeply into our stories.


We\u2019re usually so immersed in them we forget they\u2019re even there. And whenever anything happens we start writing what it means long before we should. It\u2019s tale of the farmer over and over again. What his neighbor never grasped was the farmer was never at the mercy of uncontrollable events. His life was only ever at the mercy of his own chosen perspectives.


It\u2019s not about the unexpected, the uninvited, or the unwanted. It\u2019s about us. That may seem pithy, and I don\u2019t mean for it to sound like it\u2019s easy, but nevertheless, it is true.


Perhaps Shakespeare had heard the story of the farmer when he wrote, \u201cthere is nothing either good or bad, but that thinking makes it so.\u201d


Or as Obi Wan might say, \u201cYou\u2019re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.\u201d


So on we go\u2014all our stories in tow\u2014into the unknown. I\u2019ll tell you the one and only thing I know about the future \u2026


For as long as you are here, no matter what happens next, if you truly want to, you can choose to build yourself a beautiful life.