This one’s been sitting in my Reddit saved posts for months. I found it on r/philosophy, tweeted it when I first read it, and kept coming back. It’s a parable about a horse.

A man living on the frontier loses his horse. His neighbors gather to sympathize. Bad luck. He shrugs. “Maybe.”

The horse comes back, leading a second, finer horse. The neighbors come back to congratulate him. Good luck. He shrugs. “Maybe.”

His son starts riding the new horse, gets thrown, and breaks his leg. The neighbors come back to mourn his bad fortune. He shrugs. “Maybe.”

Then war breaks out, and every able young man is conscripted and sent to the front. The son, with his broken leg, is left behind.

The parable has a name in Japanese: Saiō ga uma, “the frontier old man’s horse.” It’s older than that, Chinese, around two thousand years old, and it passed into Japanese as a four-character idiom for exactly one thing. You can’t tell yet whether something is good luck or bad. The verdict hasn’t arrived. That’s the whole point of saving it.

horse runs off returns with a second horse son falls, breaks leg war comes, son stays home maybe maybe
Every event flips the last verdict. The old man's line never moves.

I treated my JEE rank as bad luck for years. Not enough to land a circuit branch at a top IIT, which is the whole point of the exam if you grow up where I did. I went to BITS Pilani instead. A very good college. I knew that then. It didn’t feel like enough.

Here’s the part I missed for a long time. I’d been so fixed on the tag, the letters IIT, that I never asked the only question that mattered: I was going to study that stream for four years. Did I actually want to?

The rank that closed the circuit-branch door is the same rank that left me free to pick the subject I’d quietly been drawn to. Mathematics. The thing I’d have talked myself out of for a better-known name on a sweatshirt. What felt like the worst luck at eighteen turned out to be the moment the choice got handed back to me.

I’m not pretending it was painless at the time. It wasn’t. I sat with it for a while before it turned into anything.

The frontier old man’s trick isn’t optimism. He never says it’ll be fine. What he does is refuse to stamp the verdict too early, because the verdict keeps moving. The neighbors keep showing up with their condolences and their congratulations, and every single time, they’re wrong about something.

I still catch myself calling things bad luck the week they happen. A rejected application, a plan that collapses. I’m the neighbor. I want to know now. The parable says I can’t, and I’m starting to believe it.

The horse ran away. Maybe.

The bad luck was just the luck, a few years early.