Maybe Good, Maybe Bad

I have some thoughts I want to get down before they escape me.

I was recently disturbed by a story I read on the Internet about the television show Extreme Home Makeover.  Not long ago, an episode aired in which a family who took in several children whose parents had died.  The show built for them a new, modern, roomy home.  Good, right?  But wait.

The Internet article said that now the orphaned children are suing the family that took them in as well as Extreme Home Makeover.  It seems the children are claiming they were run out of the new house, humiliated, and now, having nothing, are looking for compensation.  Bad, right?  But what if this incident were able to reveal to us how foolish it is to believe everything we see, to believe in life as presented on TV?  To believe in superficial answers and absolutes?  Wouldn't that be good?  What if the two families were to reconcile and become even stronger as a result of the crisis?  What if everyone learned that material objects cannot make you happy?

This incident with the orphaned children and Extreme Home Makeover  reminded me of a classic tale called "Maybe Good, Maybe Bad." This is the tale.  I first ran across it in a magazine on myth:

There was once a farmer who owned a very beautiful horse. One day the horse decided to run away and his neighbour said to him 'what a terrible thing to happen to you - such a great loss'. The farmer replied dryly, 'you never know, maybe good, maybe bad.'

The next day, the horse came back with another horse by his side and the farmer's neighbour said 'what great good fortune, now you have two horses.' The farmer's reply was the same, 'You never know, maybe good, maybe bad'.

The next day the farmer's son fell off the new horse and broke his leg, to which the neighbour said, 'That's bad!' and of course the farmer gave his usual reply.

Soon after this, war broke out in the land and all the young men were conscripted into the army, except the farmer's son who couldn't go because of his leg. The neighbour said 'What a great piece of luck,' and the farmer replied, 'You never know...'

And it's so true, you never know.  What might be a "good" thing, turns out to have devastating consequences.  The story shows us the folly of even wanting too much control over our lives.

How this relates to writing is this:  I think in order to be an author, one must make peace with the concept of paradox.  Throw the dichotomy of good and bad out the window.

A wonderful poem in The Way of Chaung Tzu illustrates.  This is part of the poem, "Confucius and the Madman":

Never, never

Teach virtue more.

You walk in danger.

Beware!  Beware!

Even ferns can cut your feet --

When I walk crazy

I walk right:

But am I a man

To imitate?

The tree on the mountain height is its own enemy.

The grease that feeds the light devours itself.

The cinnamon tree is edible:  so it is cut down!

The lacquer tree is profitable:  they maim it.

Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.

 

No one seems to know

How useful it is to be useless.

Paradox is that place in between, that place somewhere between two opposites where life becomes "something else" all together.  That is part of the mystery.

When you write, throw away the superficial answers and the absolutes.  Work within the paradox. 

Fire is warm, but it destroys.  Water is a life-force, but in it you can drown. 

Somewhere is a condition that cancels out the two extremes.  That's the place where poets live.