We’re all trapped in the second act of the three-act play. This doesn’t pertain to any particularly story, but rather the eternal interplay of past and future, cause and effect — good and evil. There are value judgments to be made on every thing to happens, and I find myself perhaps too quick to make them. But it’s also true that the real nature of events is hidden from us to one degree or another. Frustrating and humbling, often in that order.
There is an old Chinese parable about a farmer and his neighbors. The farmer owns seven beautiful horses, about which his neighbors exclaim, “How lucky you are!.” To which the farmer replies, “We shall see.”
The farmer’s oldest son falls from one of these horses one day and breaks his arm, and the neighbors say “How unlucky you are!” To which the farmer replies, “We shall see.”
Soon after this, men from the army come to take this oldest son away to war, but they reject him because of his broken arm. “How lucky you are!” say the neighbors. “We shall see,” the farmer says.
A plague then comes through the town, and the oldest son catches the disease and dies. The neighbors lament to the farmer, “How unlucky you are!”
The farmer replies, yet again, “We shall see.”
Many take this parable to be about stoicism, and there is something to that, at least in the way the farmer must appear to his neighbors. But it’s really about the enteral churn of time. The farmer is indeed enlightened, not because he maintains his poise in the face of events, but because he recognizes that there is a constant interplay between events — between “good” and “bad,” Good and Evil — that expands out toward infinity in either direction, and as such contains values beyond our sight in the eternal present.
And so in the present it appears that storm clouds are on the horizon. A Golden Age appears past, and some alliance of decline and destruction appears imminent, possibly to give way to a new dawn some day down the line. We shall see.
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