I apologize for being unable to send my usual Sunday Letter last week. Did you miss me? I missed you, too! What happened is that my internet connection crashed late Friday. It had been slowing and going in and out for days, but on Friday afternoon, it completely died. I called for repairs and was told they couldn’t be done until “sometime Monday.”
“Oh, no!” I cried. It was the first time in a long while that I would have four consecutive days without outside obligations. I had a big list of pressing projects I could work on undisturbed and I was so looking forward to tackling them. But every one of them required my net connection. My inner child went into a deep funk, stomping her foot and shouting, “Oh Pooh! Pooh! Pooh! Pooh!”
I let her have her tantrum until bedtime. Then I told her everything would be okay, and that the best thing she could do was decide to wake up happy in the morning. To my surprise, she did! And to celebrate her decision, I took her to the park for a long and wonderful walk in the woods.
That night, I suddenly came down with a doozy of a cold that kept me in bed for the next 20 hours.
As I drifted in and out of sleep, I thought about my waiting projects. A couple of my dear fans had asked me to post my “Little Pine” tale again this year. It’s a story I wrote several years ago to welcome the coming holidays. The first year’s version was so popular that I followed it with more Little Pine stories for two years after that. Even with the net down, I decided, I could look it over and make edits. On Sunday and Monday, I did just that. And now the story is unfolding, a chapter a day, right here on this blog. Click here and you’ll find the first chapter. Clicking the link at the chapter’s end will take you to next chapter, and so on. The 7th chapter will appear later today. (They’re short, quick reads. And before you know it, you’re suddenly immersed in Little Pine’s magical world.)
It would have been easy to let myself stay in a deep pit of frustration and disappointment over my loss of the net, time, and energy all at once. My plans had been severely disrupted. But on Saturday night as my cold meds were kicking in, I remembered the old Zen story, “Maybe so; maybe not.”
It tells about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. He depended on it to do his work. “What bad fortune!” the villagers said when they learned what had happened. “Maybe so; maybe not,” the old farmer replied.
Two days later, the farmer’s horse returned, bringing with him four beautiful wild horses. “What good fortune!” the villagers said. “Maybe so; maybe not,” the old farmer replied.
When the farmer’s son was working to tame one of the wild horses, he fell and broke his leg. The villagers lamented, “How terrible!” “Maybe so; maybe not,” the old farmer replied.
A week later, the national army rode into town, forcing all able-bodied young men to join them in an ongoing war. Because his leg was broken, the farmer’s son was left behind. “Such good fortune!” said the villages. “Maybe so; maybe not,” the old farmer replied.
None of us knows what the day will hold or what the repercussions will be of any event that happens. No matter how sure we are that this situation or that happening will unfold in a certain way, life has a way of surprising us. “The only way to keep from being fooled,” I heard a guy say, “is to keep from drawing conclusions.”
In these uncertain times in which we live, I think that’s probably very good advice.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay