Having served his master faithfully for seven years, Hans decided to return home and see his Mother. His master gave him his wages, a large boulder of gold. Hans struggled along with the boulder for some time until it began to cut into his shoulders. He met a rider and traded the boulder for the horse, which was much better because he was not only free of the burden but speeding along!
Only, the horse did buck him off a few times and was a bit unpredictable so he traded the horse for a cow which was a great improvement in his fortunes because there was no danger of being thrown to the ground.
The cow moved reassuringly slowly and so for some time Hans wandered home in bliss, until he went to milk the cow for a refreshing drink and got kicked in the head for his trouble. A pig herder helped him to his feet, like a godsend, and traded his unruly cow for a placid pig.
All seemed well until a goose boy warned him that just such a pig had recently been stolen and that Hans might well be mistaken for the thief.. Luckily the goose boy did him a favour and took the elicit pig off his hands in exchange for a plump goose and so now he was in the clear. Phew.
‘When I think over it properly,” said he to himself, “I have even gained by the exchange. First there is the good roast meat, then the quantity of fat which will drip from it, and which will give me dripping for my bread for a quarter of a year, and lastly the beautiful white feathers. I will have my pillow stuffed with them, and then indeed I shall go to sleep without rocking. How glad my mother will be.”
As he passed through the last village on the way home to Mother he met a Grinder sharpening knives on a grind stone whistling a merry tune and with the sound of coins jingling in his pocket. Hans told him his story of how he had gained with every exchange on his way. The Grinder was suitably impressed.
‘If only you had the sound of jingling coins in you pocket to top your successes.’
‘How will I do that?’
‘Become a Grinder, like me,’ said the Grinder reluctantly swapping his stone for the goose. Hans went off just as chuffed as can be. Soon there would be jingling coins! Though, just as he got to the edge of his village with Mother’s cottage in sight, he felt so thirsty after his long and successful day that he stopped by the well for a drink… and the grinding stone somehow fell in.
When Hans saw the stone sinking to the bottom, he jumped for joy and with tears in his eyes thanked God for having delivered him from that heavy stone which was the only thing that troubled him.
“There is no man under the sun so fortunate as I,” he cried out.
With a light heart and free from every burden he now ran on until he was with his Mother at home.
A man once went to see Carl Jung in despair having lost his job and divorced by his wife. Jung excused himself, left the room briefly, returning with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. ‘What are you doing?’ exclaimed the man. ‘Celebrating this opportunity to re-invent yourself,’ answered Jung.
How we think about success and failure is a big deal because ultimately it’s about how you get to feel about yourself. If you are not allowed to fail, then, since you must fail, you become a failure instead. Failing then becomes an on-going part of your self-structure rather than something which once helped you grow. Instead of screwing up you get to be a screw up. It becomes part of identity because you ought to have been able to avoid it but did not and so now you are guilty too. Moreover, since to try is to fail, it is with the greatest difficulty that any initiative is then possible to remedy the situation, since that too would involve trial and error, clumsiness and experimentation.
The prejudice against failing, that it is an index of weakness or inferiority, stop a body from trying, from being curious, from wanting to see what happens and so ultimately from living and engaging with the world. How differently you might feel about yourself if you found a way of failing nobly, experiencing it as part and parcel of self discovery, as a means to an end.
What constitutes success and failure rather depends on who is running your ship. It is often the case that the person who allows themselves to fail, who risks falling down or being ridiculed, who can bear the brunt of collective opinion with equanimity somehow proves to be the one who has the perseverance to finally flower in their own unique, flawsome way. Edison burnt out fifty light bulbs before he managed to make the non-exploding kind. He succeeded by repeatedly and happily failing. Every creative endeavour has phases of not knowing what the hell is going on and having to start over.
The idea that success and failure depend, like a quantum experiment, on how you look at them seems to be underpinned by Hans counter-intuitive and yet somehow zen like responses to his various situations. Besides this parable of how to live, there also seems to be one about how to die. Our story begins with Hans having served his time in the world. Returning to Mother as his source is a metaphor of the second half of life and preparation for death.
The goals of the first and second halves are very different, even opposite. The building of a strong functional and separate ego is supplanted by a process akin to downsizing, less attachment, less craving, less driven. Each creature Hans momentarily possess seems to stand for some kind of role in life. The horse presupposes a courageous rider, the cow a homesteader, the pig a man of the land. Moreover, each animal and its implied role become increasingly primal throughout the story, from the utterly domestic horse to the wild and unruly goose and eventually to the in-organic grinding stone, perhaps what the Hindu tradition might call the diamond body, Self pared away from all its manifestations. It seems as though Hans successive ‘bargains’ constitute a process of disidentification, the experience of having a personality rather than being a personality, such that he may meet ‘Mother’ without encumbrance, regret, or shame.
‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to gain the kingdom of Heaven’. Mat 19:24
The idea that Hans, despite apparent foolishness, is consciously living his being-towards-death is amplified in the song ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, who is also off home to see his Mum, in which the reference to death, crossing the Jordan, is quite explicit..
I’m going there to see my Mother,
I’m going there,
No more to roam,
I’m only go,
Going over Jordan,
I’m only go,
Going over home.
The loss of the grinding stone in the dark depths of the well seem to prefigure death and the transformation death brings which then so gladdens and animates our hero.
“These dark waters of death are however also waters of life, while death itself and its glacial embracing is just a maternal womb – similarly as the sea, which although it incepts the sun but still later on makes it be born again.” (Jung 1998, p. 282).
Whether in the face of literal death or metaphorically, in terms of the end of an old way of being, transformation involves being parted from our treasures, the sacrificial loss of all the old self’s manifold iterations. To cross the threshold one must do so alone and empty handed.
Paradoxically, this is so basic to human experience that it also constitutes a sense of empathic belonging. ‘We are all alone, together,’ as the Zen tradition reminds us. Many tribal people who still have the values of the Great Mother measure their wealth by how much they give away. An indigenous man will often blow his entire fortune on a wedding celebration and be really happy about it because, by doing so, he has woven himself into the fabric of the community with the thread of reciprocal obligation. He will not go hungry or unprotected. Somehow, we complete ourselves best and secure ourselves safest, by giving ourselves away.
