There is an old Taoist parable about a farmer whose horse runs away. His neighbors gather to offer sympathy: “What terrible luck.” The farmer shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. The next day, the horse returns, bringing with it a herd of wild horses. “What wonderful fortune!” the neighbors exclaim. “Maybe,” the farmer replies. His son, while taming one of the horses, falls and breaks his leg. “How awful,” the neighbors lament. “Maybe.” When the army comes through, conscripting young men for war, his son is spared because of his injury.
The story never ends, because life never ends — not really. Each event flows into the next, and the meaning we assign to any single moment is always, inevitably, provisional.
We move through life with extraordinary confidence in our ability to categorize experience. This is good; that is bad. This is a blessing; that is a curse. Yet we make these pronouncements with access to only the thinnest slice of information, this moment, this feeling, this immediate consequence. We are like someone reading a single sentence from the middle of a novel and declaring the book a tragedy or a comedy.
The argument that everything is a blessing is not a claim about metaphysics or divine intention. It is, more modestly, an observation about epistemology: we simply do not know enough to declare anything a pure misfortune. The job loss that devastates us in March may be the very condition that frees us for the work we were meant to do by December. The relationship that ended in pain may have been the necessary teacher of what we actually need from love.
This is not to minimize suffering, suffering is real, and often terrible. But even here, the framework holds. What we call suffering frequently operates as a kind of sculptor, removing what is inessential and revealing what is true. The psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, wrote that even in the most brutal conditions, humans retain the freedom to choose their attitude. Many who have endured great hardship report that their suffering became inseparable from their growth. Not that they would have chosen it. Not that it was “worth it” in some tidy transactional sense. But that it became, in time, integrated into a life that had meaning.
The Stoics understood this. Marcus Aurelius wrote that the obstacle is the way, that what stands in our path becomes our path. Every setback is training in patience; every loss, a lesson in what endures; every failure, a map showing where the ground is solid.
To say everything is a blessing is really to describe a practice, the practice of looking twice at experience, of resisting the first interpretation, of asking what else might be true here? It is not passivity or denial. It is a kind of rigorous attention.
This practice changes what we see. The neuroscience is clear: what we attend to grows. When we train ourselves to look for the hidden gift, we begin to find it, not because we are manufacturing illusions, but because the gift was often there, obscured by our certainty about what we wanted and what we feared.
Perhaps the deepest blessing in seeing all things as blessing is simply this: it relieves us of the burden of judgment. We do not have to decide, with finality, whether this moment is good or bad. We can hold it more lightly. We can say, like the farmer, maybe, and remain open to what the next chapter reveals.
Life is long, and strange, and far more interconnected than it appears. The thread of causation runs in directions we cannot trace. In such a world, the wisest response may be a kind of provisional gratitude, not for the pain itself, but for the possibility that meaning will emerge, that nothing is wasted, that we are not yet at the end of the story.
And so we move forward, not with blind optimism, but with something more honest: the humility to admit we cannot see the whole, and the courage to trust that it coheres.