There is a story from ancient China, first recorded in the Huainanzi around 139 BCE, that has been circling the world for over two thousand years. It keeps circling because it keeps being true.
It goes something like this.
A farmer’s horse runs away. His neighbours come to console him. “What terrible luck,” they say.
“Maybe,” the farmer replies.
The next day the horse returns, bringing seven wild horses with it. The neighbours rush back. “What incredible luck,” they say.
“Maybe,” the farmer replies.
His son tries to tame one of the wild horses and is thrown, breaking his leg. The neighbours arrive again. “What awful luck,” they say.
“Maybe.”
The following day soldiers come to conscript the young men of the village for war. They pass over the farmer’s son because of his broken leg.
“What extraordinary luck,” the neighbours say.
“Maybe.”
What the Neighbours Represent
The neighbours in this story are not bad people. They are caring. They show up every time something happens. They feel deeply about what is occurring.
They are also wrong every single time.
Not because their facts are wrong. The horse did run away. The son did break his leg. The soldiers did come. The neighbours are reporting reality accurately. What they are getting wrong is the meaning. They are closing the story at every turn, calling it done, labelling it and moving on, and every time they do, the next event proves them premature.
This is what we do. Constantly. All of us.
We are labelling everything. Good, bad, lucky, unfortunate, a sign, a punishment, a reward. We are running commentary on events that have not finished unfolding. And that commentary is not neutral. It creates a state in the body. A story in the mind. A filter over what we are willing to see next.
The farmer does not do this. Not because he is emotionally flat or spiritually advanced beyond feeling. But because he has learned, at some deep level, that he does not have enough information to call anything finished.
The Rollercoaster Is Made of Labels
Here is the thing about emotional rollercoasters that most personal development approaches miss.
The rollercoaster is not created by the events. It is created by the labelling of the events.
Something happens. You call it bad. Your nervous system responds to the label, not just the event. Cortisol. Contraction. Scanning for more evidence that things are going wrong. Which your brain finds, because that is what it was primed to look for.
Then something happens that you call good. Relief. Expansion. Scanning for more evidence that things are going well.
Then something happens that you call bad again.
The events are just events. The nervous system is riding the labels.
This does not mean suppressing your reactions or performing neutrality you do not feel. It means beginning to notice how quickly you close the story. How fast you decide what something means before it has had time to reveal itself.
What Neutrality Actually Feels Like
Most people think neutrality means not caring. That is not it.
Neutrality means staying in the maybe. Not as a performance of spiritual detachment, but as a genuine recognition that you are always standing in the middle of something you cannot see the end of.
It is not indifference. It is trust. A trust that is not based on things going the way you want, but on a deeper understanding that the integrated process of events, as the Taoists called it, is more complex than any single moment within it.
When you stop labelling everything so fast, something shifts. The nervous system stops being jerked around by the commentary. You start to notice that most of what you called a disaster eventually revealed something. And most of what you called a triumph eventually complicated itself.
Not always immediately. Not in ways you could have predicted. But the pattern holds.
The Connection to Your Patterns
Here is where this becomes more than a philosophical concept.
The patterns that run your life are built on labels that were assigned at moments of incomplete emotional experience.
Something happened. Your nervous system called it bad, dangerous, or unacceptable. That label became a filter. And from that moment, your brain began organising your perception around it, looking for evidence that confirmed it, deleting evidence that contradicted it.
The trigger is the label being activated. The pattern is the label running the show.
When we collapse a pattern using NeuroCognitive Rebalancing, what we are doing, at its root, is finding the moment the label was assigned and correcting it. Not forcing positivity onto it. Not reframing it into something good. Finding the information that was missing at the time and letting the event complete itself into something more accurate. Something closer to maybe.
When that happens, the nervous system stops treating the event as an ongoing threat. The label releases. The pattern has nothing left to run on.
The farmer’s equanimity is not a spiritual achievement. It is what becomes available when the incomplete events underneath your labelling are finally finished.
We are all bipolar to a degree
We are all bipolar to a certain degree. Notice your reactions throughout the day. As you speak to people, watch the news, move through your life, how fast are you labelling things? Good, bad, lucky, catastrophic. What would life be like if you could sit with maybe a little longer?
The magic is not in forcing yourself to see everything as good.
The magic is in staying open long enough to find out what it actually is.