Maybe On Patience, Timing, and Not Knowing the Whole Story

There’s an old Taoist story I’ve always liked about a farmer and his son. They lived in a small village and owned a single horse, which they depended on to work their fields and make a living. One day, the horse broke through the fence and ran away into the mountains. The neighbors came by to offer their sympathy. “What terrible bad luck,” they said. The farmer simply replied, “Maybe.”

A few days later, the horse returned, bringing with it a whole pack of wild horses. Suddenly, the farmer had far more wealth than he had before. The neighbors came rushing over to celebrate. “What wonderful good luck! You’re rich!” they said. The farmer looked at them and said, “Maybe.” The following week, while trying to tame one of the wild horses, the farmer’s son was thrown off and broke his leg. The neighbors came by again. “This is horrible. Your only son is crippled and now you have no one to help you farm. What awful luck,” they said. The farmer softly replied, “Maybe.” Not long after that, the local military came through the village. The country was at war, and they were conscripting every able-bodied young man. Because the farmer’s son had a broken leg, they passed him by and left him behind. The neighbors, who had lost their own sons to the army, came to the farmer and said, “How incredibly lucky you are. Your son was spared.” The farmer looked out over his fields and simply said, “Maybe.”

I’ve always liked that story because of how little the farmer seems to know, or at least how little he feels the need to pretend that he knows. Something happens and everyone around him immediately decides what it means. Good luck. Bad luck. Wonderful. Terrible. The farmer never does that. He just says, “Maybe.”

There’s something pretty profound in that one word. We spend so much of our lives trying to decide whether something is good or bad, whether we’re moving forward or falling behind, whether something that happened to us is a blessing or a setback. But the truth is, we rarely know the whole story. Most of the time, we’re judging things while we’re still standing right in the middle of them.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, especially when it comes to patience and timing. I’m not always the most patient person. I like knowing what’s coming next. I like having a plan and knowing when things are going to happen. That’s especially true with the work I do. When someone orders a set of doors from me, there’s a lot that goes into getting them from an idea to something that can actually hang in their home. Lumber has to be ordered, material has to be milled, joints have to fit, everything has to be sanded and finished, and then there’s packing and shipping. I can plan for all of that, but there are always things I can’t control. Sometimes material takes longer to arrive. Sometimes a project takes longer than expected. Sometimes something happens that pushes everything back.

It’s easy to look at those things and immediately think, “This is a problem.” And sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s just a delay. Sometimes it’s simply part of the process.

That’s one of the things I appreciate about the Taoist way of looking at life. There’s an idea of not constantly forcing things to happen according to the timeline we’ve decided they should happen on. That doesn’t mean sitting around and doing nothing. It means doing what you can, putting in the work, paying attention, and then allowing some things to unfold in their own time.

That can be difficult. We live in a world that seems to want everything immediately. We want answers immediately. We want results immediately. We want to know where something is going and what it all means. But maybe sometimes the answer is simply that we don’t know yet.

Maybe the thing that feels like a setback today will make sense six months from now. Maybe the opportunity we missed was actually an opportunity we were better off missing. Maybe something that seems like terrible timing will eventually turn out to be exactly the timing we needed. Or maybe it really is just a disappointment. We don’t always get to know right away.

That’s the part of the farmer’s story that sticks with me. He doesn’t celebrate too early and he doesn’t mourn too early. He understands that one event doesn’t tell you how the story is going to end.

Woodworking has taught me a little of that too. You can start with a beautiful piece of lumber and a very specific idea of what you want to make. Then you start cutting and working with it, and suddenly you find something in the grain you didn’t expect. Maybe there’s a flaw you have to work around. Maybe the piece needs to be changed slightly. Sometimes the thing you end up making is different from what you had in your head when you started. And sometimes it ends up being better.

Life seems to work the same way. We make plans, we set our timelines, and we assume we know what things are supposed to look like. Then life has a way of changing the plan.

Maybe that’s not always something to fight.

Maybe patience is less about sitting around and waiting and more about trusting the process while you keep doing your part. You keep showing up. You keep doing the work. You keep moving forward, even when you don't know exactly where the road is going.

And maybe, when something happens that we don’t understand, we don’t have to immediately decide whether it’s good or bad.

Maybe we can just say, “Maybe.”

Because the story isn’t finished yet.