The Maybe Story (Chinese Farmer)

My wife and I heard this story some time ago. I can’t recall the exact source we heard it originally, but we use this story from time to time—more often these days—to remind ourselves not to get attached to assumptive outcomes.

This morning, my wife shared one source for the story: Alan Watts. He was an influential Buddhist philosopher who gave lectures throughout the United States on Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. The story is called “The Chinese Farmer Story.” 

The Chinese Farmer Story

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

— Alan Watts

It’s relatively easy to dismiss the farmer’s “maybe” as a shrug. What the story is telling us is something rarer and more demanding: a disciplined openness. A resistance to letting the moment of perception become the moment of final judgment.

Notice what the neighbors do. They arrive at each new development and immediately name it — loss, windfall, misfortune, reprieve. They aren’t unkind or foolish. They are human, just like you and me. We are meaning-making creatures, and the pressure to name things quickly can feel like wisdom. What the farmer holds, they cannot quite reach: the question left open and the ability to remain curious.

In Jungian psychology, this is known as the tension of the opposites, which underscores the practice that growth arrives not by collapsing the polarity between good and bad, but by staying with it long enough for something wiser to emerge. In everyday work-life, we call these paradoxes, and leaders work with them all the time. The neighbors resolve the tension instantly. The farmer stays in it. And that’s where his intelligence lives.

For leaders, this capacity matters more than most frameworks acknowledge. Organizations are neighbor-cultures. A key hire triggers celebration. A missed quarter triggers alarm. A competitor’s acquisition reads as threat. A process disruption reads as loss. The short arc of reaction runs fast and loud, and it rarely matches the long arc of consequence.

What the farmer demonstrates goes beyond what organizational psychologists call tolerance for ambiguity, though that is part of it. Tolerance sounds like endurance. The farmer isn’t enduring anything. He is inhabiting uncertainty with fluency, even ease. His “maybe” is not a pause before the answer. For now, it is the answer.

The parable traces back to the Huainanzi, a Chinese philosophical text from 139 BCE, and it runs directly through the Tao Te Ching: misery is what happiness rests upon; happiness is what misery lurks beneath. The polarity is the structure of things. And the farmer knows this experientially, the way the oak knows wind as a way of standing and staying rooted.

The most adaptive leaders I have known carry some version of this posture. They project steadiness without forcing false certainty. They resist the organizational pressure to name every development as a crisis or a triumph before the full story reveals itself. And in doing so, they hold space for something that premature conclusions always foreclose: the imaginative opportunity. The third thing. The door in the wall that only appears when you stop trying to break the wall down.

The neighbors, for all their good intentions, keep closing the story, but the farmer keeps it open.

The question worth sitting with is this: where in your leadership are you reaching too quickly for the verdict? And what might become available, in your team, in your strategy, in your own thinking, if you stayed with the unresolved middle just a little longer?

The farmer didn’t know what the future held. He just knew that he didn’t know. And that knowing, it turns out, was its own kind of wisdom.

“You never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.” 

— Alan Watts

If you want to learn more about Alan Watts or watch free lectures, you can find them here on YouTube.

Relevant posts include:

• Soaking Up Life & Making an Impact
• The Change We Seek to Make
• Root, Sap, and Soil
• Three Contrary Wishes
• Integrity, Reciprocity, and Beauty — What The Beautiful Business is About

If you’d like to know more about my consulting and coaching work for leaders, cultures, and brands, go here.