Don’t Make Hasty Decisions

Once upon a time there was an old man in a village. He was very poor, but even the King envied him… He had a white horse so legendary that the King offered the old man almost his entire treasury for it, but the man would not sell it..
“To me, this horse is not a horse; it is a friend. Would a man sell his friend?” he always used to say. One morning they woke up and the horse was gone. The villagers gathered around the old man: “You senile old man, it was obvious they wouldn’t leave this horse to you, that they would steal it. If you had sold it to the King, you would have lived like a lord for the rest of your life. Now you have neither money nor a horse,” they said…

The old man said: “Don’t be in a hurry to judge. Just say ‘the horse is gone’, because that is the truth. Anything beyond that is your interpretation and your judgement. Is the loss of my horse a misfortune or a blessing? We don’t know yet, because this event is only a beginning. No one can know what will follow.”
The villagers roared with laughter at the senile old man. Before 15 days had passed, the horse suddenly came back one night… It turned out it had not been stolen; it had gone off to the mountains on its own. And on its way back, it brought along 12 wild horses from the valley. Seeing this, the villagers gathered and apologised to the old man.

“Old man,” they said, “you were right. The loss of your horse was not a misfortune; it was practically a stroke of luck for you. Now you have a whole herd of horses..”
“Once again you are in a hurry to judge,” said the old man. “Just say that the horse has come back. That is the only known truth. We don’t yet know what lies beyond it. This is only the beginning.
How can you judge a book after reading only the first word of the first sentence?”
This time the villagers did not openly make fun of the old man, but they thought to themselves, “This fellow really is an idiot”… Before a week had passed, the old man’s only son, who was trying to tame the wild horses, fell off a horse and broke his leg. The son, who provided for the household, would now be bedridden for a long time. The villagers came to the old man again. “You were right once more,” they said.
“Because of these horses, your only son won’t be able to use his leg for a long time. And there is no one else to look after you. Now you will be poorer and more miserable than before,” they said. The old man replied, “You have caught the disease of judging too early.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry. My son broke his leg. That is the truth. Anything beyond it is your judgement. But how true is it? Life comes in small pieces like this, and you are never told what will happen next.”

A few weeks later, enemies attacked with a far larger army. As a last hope, the King called up all the young men who could bear arms. The officials who came to the village conscripted all the young men except the old man’s son with the broken leg. The village was plunged into mourning, because there was no way the war could be won, and everyone knew that the young men who left would end up either dead or taken prisoner.
The villagers came to the old man once again… “It turns out you were right again,” they said. “Your son’s leg is broken, but at least he is with you. Ours may never return to the village. Your son breaking his leg was not a misfortune after all, but a blessing…”
“Go on judging too early,” said the old man. “Yet no one can know what will happen. There is only one known truth: my son is with me, and yours are in the army… But only God knows which of these is good fortune and which is misfortune.”

“Don’t make hasty decisions. Avoid judging the whole of life by looking at one small slice of it. A judgement is the state in which the mind stops.
Once you have made a judgement, the mind stops thinking and therefore stops growing.
Even so, the mind always pushes a person towards judgement, because being in a state of growth is dangerous and makes people uneasy. Yet the journey never ends. As one road ends, a new one begins. As one door closes, another opens. You reach a goal and see that a higher goal is right there.”

Note: This is a quotation.

Hakan KOCAMAN

25 February 2010, Trabzon