the old man and the horse / 塞翁失馬，焉知非福 / blessings in disguise / dodging a bullet

Daily writing prompt

Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

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(someone i’m insanely grateful for brought this video in to my orbit a couple months ago and I was reminded of this parable)

塞翁失馬，焉知非福

Loosely translated: how is one to know if old man Sai losing his horse was a blessing in disguise?

In grade school, I attended an after-school, Chinese-language program. There, teachers taught us idioms, parables, of which most have decided to stay in the depths of my subconscious, as I have no practical use for them in everyday life as a young adult in the land of Uncle Sam.

But I’ve changed a great deal in the past year and now I understand that I don’t need a practical use for this knowledge. I can just reference the wisdoms of these idioms/parables acquired during my 10+ years of after-school/weekend Chinese school when the going gets rough.

In early 2023, I got laid off. My coworkers were great and I didn’t hate the mission of my company, but late 2022 I admitted to myself what my soul already knew. The plan was to leave the next year, and two months in, I lost my horse.

Naturally, I tried to re-acquire a horse very similar to the one that I had lost. I started job-hunting and did what the people closest to me thought I should be doing. Because it was only natural for the people closest to me to want what was best for me (/s). Months later, I went to Taiwan with the people closest to me and aggravated a back injury, got COVID, engaged in screaming matches/cuss words in Taiwanese Mandarin+Hokkien, came back on a 13-hour flight with back pain+COVID, and was dropped off at my apartment, free of the company of people who claimed they loved and cared about me. My back was fucked up and I was still very sick but I was free.

Naturally, mid-20s me couldn’t handle the loss of yet another horse. And kept the company of people who I began to understand needed me to be a certain way to feel better about their own lives. And then, I realized almost everyone in my life needed me to be a certain way to feel better about their own lives.

When the going gets rough, the rage comes back. Do you know how difficult it is to reawaken zest for life after a childhood of domestic abuse? Childlike wonder is not naiveté; the quality of being hardened is not strength.

But I digress.

Something something I’m at a stage in my life where I think I’m about to lose several more horses something something 塞翁失馬，焉知非福.