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 the Perception Collapse Method™, 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.
What Is the Meaning of the Taoist Story of the Farmer?
The Taoist story of the farmer is about the gap between what happens and what we decide it means. Every event in the story is real. Every judgement of those events is premature. The farmer’s one word, “maybe”, refuses to close a chapter that is still being written.
In Taoist thought, events don’t sit in neat boxes marked good and bad. They flow into each other. Loss carries the seed of gain, and gain carries the seed of loss. The farmer isn’t being clever or aloof. He is simply describing reality more accurately than his neighbours.
Where Does the Story Come From?
The parable comes from the Huainanzi, a collection of philosophical writings compiled at the court of Liu An, King of Huainan, during the Han dynasty. In the original, the main character is an old man living on China’s northern frontier, and his horse wanders off into nomad territory.
The story gave rise to a Chinese saying still in use today: 塞翁失马，焉知非福 (sài wēng shī mǎ, yān zhī fēi fú). Roughly translated: “The old man at the frontier lost his horse. Who could say it wasn’t a blessing?”
Most people in the West know the version built around the word “maybe”, which spread largely through the talks of philosopher Alan Watts. You may also have heard it called “good luck, bad luck, who knows”.
"Maybe" Is Not Looking on the Bright Side
The most common misreading of this parable is that everything happens for a reason, so look for the silver lining. That isn’t what the farmer does. He never calls the runaway horse a gift. He never says his son’s broken leg is a blessing.
Forcing a positive label onto a painful event is still labelling. It swaps one early verdict for another, and your body knows the difference. “Maybe” is neither good nor bad. It is a plain admission that you don’t have the full picture yet.
How to Practise the Farmer's "Maybe" in Everyday Life
- Catch the label. Notice the moment you call something good or bad. A client cancels. A text goes unanswered. Your partner’s tone shifts at dinner. Watch how fast the verdict lands.
- Separate the event from the story. Write down what happened in plain facts. Then write down the meaning you attached to it. They are rarely the same thing.
- Find where the label lives in your body. A tight chest, a clenched jaw, a drop in the stomach. That is your nervous system responding to the verdict, not the event.
- Ask what’s missing. What don’t you know yet? What would have to be true for this to turn out differently from what you’re predicting?
- Look back. Pick something from five years ago you were certain was a disaster. Trace what it led to.
If the same reaction keeps firing however often you practise this, the label was likely set much earlier, at a moment that never finished. That is where the real work begins.
Frequently Asked Questions
We rarely have enough information to judge an event while it is still unfolding, and those judgements shape how we feel and what we notice next.
Yes. It is the same parable, also known as “Sai Weng lost his horse”, “the old man lost his horse” and “the Chinese farmer story”.
No single author is credited. It appears in the Huainanzi, compiled under Liu An around 139 BCE. Alan Watts later brought it to Western audiences.
No. Detachment pushes feeling away. The farmer stays calm because he never takes on the verdict in the first place, so there is nothing to push away.
A trigger is an old label being activated. When the original event is completed, the label releases and the reaction loses its charge.