A happy old couple – leaving worries behind is a prerequisite for an easy life.
There was a poor old couple in the countryside. One day, they wanted to pull the only horse worth a little money at home to the market for something more useful. So the older man took the horse and went to the market.
The older man first exchanged a cow and then used the cow for a sheep, the sheep for a fat goose, the goose for a hen, and finally, the hen for a large bag of rotten apples.
In each exchange, the older man wanted to surprise his partner.
When the older man carried the big bag of rotten apples to a small hotel to rest, he met two young people. The older man talked about his market in a casual conversation.
Two young people listened, laughed, and said, “Old man, you will have to return to the wife a beating.”
The older man insisted that he would never, and the young men bet a bag of gold coins. So, the two young men returned to the older man’s home together.
The older woman was very happy to see the older man back and listened excitedly to the older man’s story about the market. Whenever she heard the older man talk about exchanging one thing for another, she admired the older man.
From time to time, her mouth said, “Oh, we have milk to drink!”
“Goat’s milk is good, too.”
“Oh, the goose feathers are so beautiful!”
“Oh, we have eggs this time!”
Finally, when she heard the old man carrying back a bag of apples that had begun to rot, she was equally nonplussed and exclaimed, “We’ll have sweet apple pie tonight!”
And just like that, the two young men lost a bag of gold coins.
A philosopher once said, “Wise people never sit around mourning their losses but happily find ways to compensate for their wounds.” We also often lose something in life, when if we can look at it with open-mindedness like the older woman in the fairy tale, then there will be fewer worries.
Here, Andersen wants to tell us, do not to lament or blame life for the loss of a horse. Since there is a bag of rotten apples, make some apple pie so that life can be interesting and happy. If you lament and complain, you can’t get back what you’ve lost and hurt yourself physically and mentally. Therefore, it is the wisdom of life to accept what has happened.
