ripped this off from mei's blog. =]


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 for 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 .

thats 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 cant 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 .