Well, I loved your interpretation of this lesson. I believe strongly in the parable of the Chinese farmer and his horse (there are many versions of this universal lesson) and this seems to be a version of that… and to me, it is the lesson of “you never know” what outcome in a situation is either good or bad—before, during, and after.

And so you have a choice in life: keep on living following a trajectory that makes some sort of sense to yourself or decide that whatever life throws at you renders a past, current, or future decision wrong.

This guy was thrown into a situation I am too humble to just claim as “bad” or some other adjective I didn’t earn the right to use on his behalf. But he has a shop, a family, he’s alive… it may not be where he was, but who knows what would have become of him had his life not been forced down that path.

Maybe the love he and his wife have created, and the potential of his kids, is far more profound than anything we know and in that he has found most dying people claim is life’s most vital asset. Or maybe, like Viktor Frankel and Abraham Lincoln, he has found some extraordinary meaning in his suffering.

From our privilege, we have no right to comment the circumstances of his life but by finding a lesson of your own in your interaction with him, which you are now generous enough to share with others, I think we can say that his circumstances have given him a nobility that we should all hope to achieve.

I’ve have the privilege counting as a close friend a gal who was adopted from Ethiopia at 11. When I met her, of course, I realized that she was the embodiment of the girl we were all admonished to think about if we didn’t want to finish our dinner in the 1970s.

Throughout our friendship, I’ve asked her a lot of insanely inappropriate questions. I wanted to know things like how she felt about the cards she was dealt, how she wished people like me would do to help the world in some sort of valuable way, and what she thought of privilege, etc.

Honestly, I kind think that what you’ve shared here is pretty much what she learned in life and hoped for others. She’d probably not want you to be thinking you had to *run* so much…but I interpret your *running* as a metaphor for: keep living, for the love of all unicorns. Maybe I’m wrong there and you really did mean RUN, DAMMIT!

But if it is a metaphor indeed you are spot on because everyone’s journey *will* be messed up and hard and unfair and a whole bunch of other shitty adjectives, no matter what, so why not just see what you can learn long the way and then use that learning to help others.

Thanks for sharing. Please keep writing, I really enjoy your work every time I stumble on it.