In the 1960s I heard a story about a young king of ancient days. He wanted to learn wisdom but found that this came in brief items in all manner of books, and wise saying from all sorts of places. So he gathered a team of learned men, and told them that he wanted all the wisdom in the world written into a set of books. And after years of toil they came to him with a set of ten huge books, which the king had printed and distributed to every town.
But after seeing that most of his people couldn’t read or didn’t bother to read so many books, he went back to those that had done them and asked For all wisdom to be boiled down into a sngle book, and after many more years that book was brought to him. Not content, (typical king of the time) he considered again, and asked that the wisdom of the world be brought down to a phrase. And it was, and the king had THIS TOO SHALL PASS engraved over the door of his palace. Still he wasn’t satisfied, and at last, he came back to his sages and asked for wisdom to be expressed as one word and it was. The wisdom of the world is MAYBE.
To my mind that’s right. But I prefer my own wisdom which backs up to the earlier phrase. Endure the bad, it passes, wallow in the good, it won’t last – but it’ll come around again. And be optimistic, people that are, always feel a lot better than pessimists- we also live longer, say medical specialists. In my case that seems to run in the family genes most times. We’re optimists, and I like it that way. Because sure there’s bad times, but you live through them, and then there’s the good times, they’re great and you can look forward to them coming back. And somehow, if you expect them, there they are, on the horizon heading your way. At least, I’ve always found it so.
