The Lesson

October 13, 2025

Greetings from the liminal,

Sometimes I get a glimmer of a moment, now five decades ago, that rises up unbidden and offers an answer I didn’t pose the question for. The moment was tucked inside countless others of beautiful importance, in the months and miles I pedaled my bicycle across the country, some of the time in the company of two other riders I met on the road.

Lou and I sat on the edge of a cliff looking into the striated moonscape of the Badlands. It was a hot, shadeless day in South Dakota, and we were taking a break from riding. We were surrounded by sensual carvings, art formed millions of years ago, a world that had passed into many other worlds since then. Abe, the third of our party, was already back on the road, impatient with the stillness of the place.  

The three of us had spent the last weeks together traveling across the plains in various weather, we met a wide range of people, most friendly, some not. There had been moments where I was afraid, others angry, still others exhilarated. In all that time, I was impressed by Lou’s even, patient reaction to whatever life presented. It was such a contrast to my own temperament, and Abe’s, so it stood out.

We had a simple conversation, soaking in the quiet beauty of the Badlands, each offering a sentence, answering, then letting the silence be the third participant.  Lou had a small notebook that he wrote in, and that seemed to hold his main attention.  I finally asked him how he managed to keep such a calm outlook no matter what the day brought.  He laughed a little, saying it didn’t feel that way inside all the time.  He said there was a fable he thought of from time to time, asked me if I wanted to hear it.  I did, so he closed his notebook and said:

“There was a king who wanted to be a good leader and so he gathered his advisors together to ask for guidance. He showed them a ring that he wore always and he said to them: “Engrave something on this ring that will remind me to be humble in the good times, and hopeful in the hard times.”  The advisors went away and thought and then returned with the ring which was engraved with three words: ‘All Things Pass’.”

I waited thinking there might be more, but finally said “That’s it?”

Lou nodded, already looking at his journal, thinking about other things.

“‘All things pass.’  That’s easy to say,” I said, leaking a little sarcasm.

“Yes, it is,” Lou said, ignoring my tone, “that’s partly why it is so helpful.”

In the days that followed I poked a little at Lou for the simplistic, perhaps naïve, message in the little parable.  I gave really specific examples of where it wouldn’t apply, how sometimes things don’t pass, and what does the entitled king do about that?  He didn’t really try to defend the thought, merely left it with me to use or not use when I thought it would be helpful. 

I also thought about the other side of the coin which suggested that the good times will pass as well, and began to sense the truth.  Every mountain road we climbed usually gave us a breathtaking view, and then a thrilling downhill ride on the other side.  We learned to appreciate these exhilarating moments, glittering and bold and soon past.  Admittedly we felt as though we earned the rewards, since only our hard work brought us to those high passes.  But regardless, we enjoyed them, we rode on, and other experiences replaced them.

Weeks later we were riding through a dust storm in Idaho, a layer of silt left behind from a flood, lifted by a raging headwind.  We struggled to keep our bicycles upright in the wind, and all of us were tired and cold wanted to be on some other road. Worse, our riding partner Abe had a series of flat tires, six in one day, and the last one when he hit a piece of wood in the road that broke his wheel.  Abe was apoplectic.

We sat on the side of the road and waited. Abe raged at the people who threw trash on the road, at the flimsy bike tire, at the unfairness of the wind, the stupid silt that shouldn’t be there. We could not talk about solving the problem until Abe could take a breath and look at it. 

I watched as Lou paused in this little vignette, saw the same calm look in his eyes, the same sense of patience I’d seen in other challenging moments.  Lou had already gone into the future and seen the two of them hitchhiking to Boise with the wheel and finding a bike shop.  He already saw we would ride on into Oregon, felt the wind drop, felt the sun heating the world.  He couldn’t know that the wheel would be fixed for free, didn’t know that someone in the shop would offer to drive them back to where I sat with the rest of our gear. He couldn’t guess if we would have other flat tires, or who we would meet, or if we would be celebrating or scared or wet and hungry.  He only knew one thing.

In the years following I looked at those three words from time to time and contrasted the moments when they were true and the times they were not.  I made peace with its limitations.  The little story’s message is not perfect, nor is any prayer or poem or advice.  But it does offer some balance.

Saying that ‘All Things Pass’ is no comfort to those who have never seen change in their struggles. It doesn’t mean there will never be injustice, or that cancer will be solved in our lifetime, or that grief and its causes will not exist. We can make a list of what we believe are permanent challenges in our world.  And while we are at it, we can also make a longer list of the things that will pass. 

Your pain may pass.  The unfairness of your neighbor may pass.  How you feel about your loss may pass.  The struggle with your landlord, the endless repairs on your car, the relationship that burst like a balloon.  And in the same breath we also must see that every beautiful moment has no guarantee of existing always.  We can only be grateful, and humble, that the sun is shining even as it moves across the sky.  This doesn’t mean we should dread the happy times because they will end, it merely suggests that we love them in their ephemeral poetry.

The story Lou shared, and its cousins in the bible and in the teachings of Lao Tzu, and elsewhere, have a clear optimistic tone.  Perhaps that tone is overshadowed by what might seem overwhelming evidence of pervasive inhumanity, or the fickleness of fate.  But often we get to choose if the adage applies or not.  We only need to pause to look at the circumstances through a longer lens, imagine it coming to an end, the struggle passing, the victory passing, the new experience becoming our reality. In the choice is a power we should never give up.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”  Viktor E. Frankl

Hope this finds you living in the change,

David

Copyright © 2025 David Smith