The Old Man and His Shoe
One day an old man boarded a bus. As he was
going up the steps, one of his shoes slipped off.
The door closed and the bus moved off so he was
unable to retrieve it. The old man calmly took off
his other shoe and threw it out of the window.
A young man on the bus saw what happened, and
could not help going up to the old man and
asking, "I noticed what you did, sir. Why did you
throw out your other shoe?"
The old man promptly replied, "So that whoever
finds them will be able to use them."
The old man in the story understood a fundamental
philosophy for life - do not hold on to something
simply for the sake of possessing it or because
you do not wish others to have it.
We lose things all the time. The loss may seem to
us grievous and unjust initially, but loss only
happens so that positive changes can occur in our
lives.
We should not always assume that losing
something is bad, because if things do not shift,
we'll never become better people or experience
better things.
That's not to say of course that we only lose "bad"
things; it simply means that in order for us to
mature emotionally and spiritually, and for us to
contribute to the world, the interchange between
loss and gain is necessary.
Like the old man in the story, we have to learn to
let go. The world had decided that it was time for
the old man to lose his shoe. Maybe this
happened to add momentum to a series of events
leading to a better pair of shoes for the old man.
Maybe the search for another pair of shoes would
lead the old man to a great benefactor. Maybe the
world decided that someone else needed the
shoes more.
Whatever the reason, we can't avoid losing things.
The old man understood this.
One of his shoes had gone out of his reach. The
remaining shoe would not have been much help to
him, but it would be a cherished gift to a homeless
person desperately in need of protection from the
ground.
Hoarding possessions does nothing to make us or
the world better.
We all have to decide constantly if some things or
people have run their course in our lives or would
be better off with others.
We then have to muster the courage to give them
away.
