Stumbling Confidently(ish) in the Direction of My Dreams

Letting go of expectations while gunning the engine

Hello, Dreamers & Doers!

My life has been filled with new events over the past several weeks. My wife has been incredibly sick, and yesterday we found out she has a bad case of shingles that has also triggered an inflammation of her Sjögren's Syndrome (or just as likely her Sjögren's flareup led to the shingles outbreak.)

Our two cars (which both have over 200,000 miles) are currently idle, having died in the past couple of weeks. I’m not hopeful that they can be revived.

Plus, there is all the other stuff that goes with living life in this world.

My gut reaction to all of this was not quite hysterical, but I did shake my fist at Zeus up in the heavens.

Eventually, I was reminded of the Taoist parable of The Lost Horse.

It goes something like this:

An old farmer awoke one morning to find his only horse had run away. The people of the village all told him how unfortunate that was for him.

The old farmer simply replied, “Who knows?”

A week later, the lost horse returned guiding five wild horses back to the farmer. The villagers cheered and told the old farmer, he was so lucky!

The old farmer replied, “Who knows?”

The old farmer’s only son fell off one of the wild horses while trying to tame him, breaking his leg.

The villagers all lamented this as a supreme tragedy.

However, the old farmer would only say, “Who knows?”

A few days later, military recruiters from the Emporer came to draft soldiers, but because the son had a broken leg, he was not pressed into military service.

The villagers rejoiced for the farmer because surely he could see that everything had worked out for his benefit. He was indeed fortunate.

The old farmer kept working his plot and only briefly glanced up to shrug his shoulders and reply, “Who knows?”

There is a Chinese idiom taken from this story that goes:

塞翁失馬 焉知非福 (Sài Wēng Shī Mǎ Yān Zhī Fēi Fú or The old man on the frontier lost his horse, who knows if this lucky or not?)¹

The Taoist message is that life is in flow and you cannot know in the moment if an event is good or bad. Any event just is.

This story helps keep me grounded, and in the weird way my brain works, it also reminds me of this quote from Henry David Thoreau:

I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

By my experiment, I have learned that I’m not great at advancing confidently, but I can stumble and muddle my way toward my dreams with a fortitude that makes a decent substitute for confidence.

The key is to let go of expectations for any given project. Like the old farmer, all I can do is keep working my plot and say, “Who knows?” when pondering the future results of any post, book, or client project.

Right now, I’m in a place where I need to gun my engine. I need to work harder since our household needs me to bring in more money while still being the primary caregiver. I can control my effort and my attitude. My experience has been that when I put in the work and focus on the process, not the results, I find uncommon success.

My dream is to make a good full-time living from my creative work in a way that nourishes my soul. In other words, I want to make a living from my way of living. I have no idea how recent events will ultimately affect my dream.

I do know that I can keep stumbling forward, writing, drawing, and collaging the full spectrum of my human emotions.

Here are two recent illustrations I’ve made for editorial illustration projects that have stalled:

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

P.S. While doing some final edits on this post, my dog threw up on our new couch just to test my level of commitment to the principles put forth in this post.

1. This shorter version of the idiom is far more common, 塞翁失馬 (Sài Wēng Shī Mǎ or The old man on the frontier lost his horse.) However, it was nonsensical to me when I was first learning Mandarin. The longer version made some sense, but it was only after I eventually learned the full parable that the idiom’s meaning clicked.