The Retraction

Well, I have some good news and bad news.

The good news is that I found my walkman. We are in the middle of a move to new office space and I placed it in one of the bags I had. I was very happy when I found it but then I realized that I cast apersions on the characters of my coworkers. Granted, some of it is earned but I went ahead and determined that one of them was the thief and this attitude effectively coloured my whole day, making me less than productive.

That was the bad news-the fact that I jumped to a conclusion and did not consider all options.

There is a Chinese parable that one of the Taoist masters told and it went something like this.

A man who was a woodcutter came back from lunch and found his ax missing. He looked for it in the area where he was working. He remembered that there was a boy who was hanging around. At first, he though him lazy, because he did not seem him working. When he saw the boy again, he thought that the boy took the ax. He thought that the boy walked like a theif and acted like a theif. The woodcutter then found his ax lying right where he had left it-inside of a stump. He had done this to keep it from being stolen while he had gone to lunch. He felt badly about accusing the boy, even though he had not confronted him, he had jumped to a conclusion.
Now when he saw the boy, he saw a boy who walked upright and honorably.