Once upon a time in a faraway land,
there lived a Chinese
wise man and his disciple. One day in
their travels, they saw
a hut in the distance. As they approached
they realized that it was occupied in spite of its extremely
poor appearance.
In that desolate place where there were
no crops and no
trees,
a man lived with his wife, three young children and a thin,
tired cow. Since they were hungry and
thirsty, the wise man
and his disciple stopped for a few hours
and were well
received. At one point, the wise man asked:
“This is a very poor place, far away from
anything. How do
you
survive?”
“You see that cow? That’s what keeps us going,” said the
head
of the family. “She gives us milk, some of
it we drink and
some were make into cheese. When
there is extra, we go into the city and exchange the milk and
cheese for other
types of food.
That’s how we survive.”
The wise man thanked them for their
hospitality and left. When he reached the first bend in the
road, he said to his
disciple:
“Go back, get the cow, take her to the cliff
in front of us, and
push her off.” The disciple could not believe what he
was hearing.
“I cannot do that, master! How can you
be so ungrateful?
The
cow is all they have. If I throw it on the cliff, they’ll have no
way to survive. Without the cow, they’ll
all die!”
The wise man, an elderly Chinese man,
took a deep breath
and repeated the order: “Go ahead. Push the cow off the
cliff.” Though outraged at what he was
being asked to do,
the student was resigned to obey his
master.
He returned to the hut and quietly led the animal to the edge
of the cliff and pushed. The cow fell
down the cliff and died.
As the years passed by, remorse for what
he had done
never left the disciple. One spring day, the guilt became too
much to bear and he left the wise man
and returned to that
little shack. He wanted to find out what
had happened to
that family, to help them out, apologize, or somehow make
amends.
Upon rounding a turn in the road, he
could not believe what
his eyes were showing him. In place of
the poor shack there was a beautiful house with trees all
around, a swimming
pool, several cars in the garage, a
satellite dish, and on and
on.
Three good-looking teenagers and their parents were
celebrating their first million dollars.
The heart of the disciple froze. What
could have happened
to the family? Without a doubt, they must
have been starving to death and forced to sell their
land and leave. At
that moment, the student thought they
must all be begging
on the street corners of some city. He
approached the house and asked a man that was
passing by about the
whereabouts of the family that had lived
there several years before.
“You’re looking at it,” said the man,
pointing to the people gathered around the barbecue.Unable to
believe what he
was hearing, the disciple walked through
the gate and took
a few steps closer to the pool where he
recognized the man from several years before, only now he
was strong and
confident, the woman was happy, and
the children were
now nice-looking teenagers.
He was dumbfounded, and went over to the man and asked:
“What happened? I was here with my
teacher a few years
ago and this was a miserable place.
There was nothing. What did you do to
improve your lives in such a short time?”
The man looked at the disciple, and
replied with a smile:
“We had a cow that kept us alive. She
was all we had. But
one day she fell down the cliff and died. To
survive, we had to
start doing other things, develop skills we
didn’t even know
we had.
And so, because we were forced to come up with new ways
of
doing things, we are now much better off
than before.”
Moral of the story: Sometimes our
dependency on something small and limited is the
biggest obstacle to our
growth. Perhaps the best thing that could
happen to you is
to push your “cow” down the cliff. Once
you free yourself of the thought “it’s little but it’s certain,” or
of that idea “I am
not doing great but there are people who
are much worse
than me” — then your life will
really change. Happy new year
