Derek Sivers shares a fable that I find particularly interesting.  I am reading Garth Stein's excellent The Art of Racing in the Rain right now, and I find parallels to the book in this fable.  I think both illustrate a piece of wisdom about life that is far too easy to ignore -- if you ever notice it at all.  Allow me to try to intermesh the two.

But first, the fable:

A farmer had only one horse.  One day, his horse ran away.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I'm so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.”   The man just said, “We'll see.”

A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses.  The man and his son corraled all 21 horses.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!”   The man just said, “We'll see.”

One of the wild horses kicked the man's only son, breaking both his legs.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I'm so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.”   The man just said, “We'll see.”

The country went to war, and every able-bodied young man was drafted to fight. The war was terrible and killed every young man, but the farmer's son was spared, since his broken legs prevented him from being drafted.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!”   The man just said, “We'll see.”

In personal and professional pursuits, it's all to easy to overthink and lose yourself in the drama of the moment.  It's equally easy to look around you and make external things wholly responsible for whatever you're going through.

Next time, ask yourself: what have I done to put myself in this position?  How do I prepare for what's next?

Stein notes that a good race driver executes on his immediate situation, and then instantly looks down-track to the next turn, realizing that he needs to work towards a favorable outcome there, too.  Be in the moment, but always realize another moment is coming.

Don't go nuts with every victory, and don't beat yourself up for every loss.  Do what you can to stay centered.  It's hard as hell, but a fight worth fighting.

And for those moments when life seems out of control due to circumstances beyond your control?  What do you?  Do you fight, flee, celebrate or mourn?

We'll see.

From the press release:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced a new update to Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone and iPod touch, which allows readers to enjoy the benefits of embedded video and audio clips in Kindle books. The first books to take advantage of this new technology, including Rick Steves' London by Rick Steves and Together We Cannot Fail by Terry Golway, are available in the Kindle Store at http://www.amazon.com/kindleaudiovideo.

The Kindle app for iOS devices now out-features the Kindle hardware itself.

Finally, know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli
dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like – i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left – and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad. — from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

One of the most beautiful sentences DFW ever put to paper.

Foreign Policy asked their top Global Thinkers to recommend their favorite – or most important – books.  The responses range from children’s books to biographies to policy manuals to fantasy novels.  Here’s the full list of their suggestions.

The best college commencement speech ever written:

I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Such an amazing speech in its entirety, but very sad in that some parts inform Wallace's suicide in 2008.

Kevin Guilfoile blogging for Infinite Summer, wonders if anyone will be reading IJ 100 years from now, or if the book’s sheer attention and effort requirements – coupled with timestamped pop-culture references – will doom the work to literary extinction.

I’ve had a lot of people over the years try to pass Infinite Jest into my hands, and there was always a kind of urgency to their plea that was frankly kind of off-putting. I think now that urgency might be related to this sense, perhaps unconscious, that this book by its very nature might be in jeopardy of deleting its own map. I don’t think I’d ever say that any single book is necessary, but anyone who connects with a novel the way so many have with Infinite Jest is clearly going to be distressed by the possibility that it might be on the endangered list, even a few years down the road. I suspect the intensity with which people try to push this novel on other readers is related to the sense that it might be endangered, somehow. That as epic and important and groundbreaking as it is, its future might not be ensured. If there has been a level of desperation in the pleas to me by IJ lovers over the years, I now understand it.

One day, I’ll actually sit down and read the copy I’ve had on my shelf for over seven years.  One of my best friends tells me every chance he gets that it’s the best book he’s ever read, and I remember when he read it he devoured it with a cultish obsession.

I have a feeling I’m missing something big.