Every tradition that teaches you reap what you sow also tells the story of a man who reaped what he never sowed. The law is old. The correction is just as old, and it is the part that gets left out.
There is a sentence almost every boy has heard by the time he is sixteen, from a coach, a grandmother, a man on a screen or a monk: you reap what you sow. It is mostly true, and I am not going to argue with it. My quarrel is with the version said the other way around — whatever you reap, you must have sown — because that is the one that turns a hailstorm into a verdict. Both of the traditions I live between went out of their way to call it wrong, and the speakers I learned the law from — on tape, on a screen, in books, over twenty years of selling — mostly left that part out.
I spent my working life selling, and the men I learned from while I did it taught the sentence from Galatians as a law of nature, filed beside gravity. Don't try to beat it. Plant thistles and don't go looking for pumpkins. Plant pumpkins and you won't get thistles. It pays out more than it takes in: one seed, a stalk full of ears. And if you don't sow, you don't reap. I believed every word, and I still do. I planted cattle, in Texas and in Thailand, and the arithmetic held: the men who worked the field in the spring were the men standing in the harvest.
Then there is the turn that gives this essay its title, and it is the best thing those men ever taught me: whatever you reap is what you've sown. I had a list once. The government, the prices, the traffic, the weather, my relatives. The list had one problem, and the problem was that I wasn't on it. Where do you find the man who planted your crop? In the mirror. I threw the list away and I have not kept one since, and that one move is worth more than anything else I took from them in twenty years.
But the same men, when they were honest, admitted the other thing. A farmer plants in the spring and tends his crop all summer. He works ten and twelve hours a day, loves his family, and is an honorable man, and he deserves every bit of his harvest. The day before the combines go into the field, a hailstorm beats it into the ground. What did he do wrong? Nothing. It's that kind of planet.
I know the hail. A bull ran me into a gate once and did my back in, and nobody planted that. I found a legal way to sell the best genetics in Texas for a quarter of what the old ranches charged, and the association the old ranches ran froze every account I had, and it took seven years, and nobody planted that either. There were also weeds, in those same years, that I planted myself, and those belong in a journal and not on a website. The point is that both kinds were in the same field at the same time. Put the mirror beside the hail and they cannot both be laws: if whatever you reap is what you've sown, the farmer sowed hail. I want to set them side by side instead of pretending one of them away.
Galatians is not about income. The very next verse names the sowing: "he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." Hosea's whirlwind is a prophet's warning to a nation, not a rate of return. The law like gravity and the "much more" are a salesman's gloss on a folk law, and I was the salesman as often as anyone.
And the oldest story I know about sowing is not a law at all. A farmer goes out with good seed, and some of it the birds take, and some lands on rock and comes up fast and dies in the first hot week, and some lands in the weeds and is choked, and some lands in good ground and brings forth thirty, sixty, a hundred times what went in (Matthew 13). The seed was the same seed. The ground was the ground. The farmer's part was that he kept sowing, and the hundredfold paid for everything the birds took. I have lived that story with children, with cattle buyers and with men, and it has never once been wrong.
The Dhammapada opens with the same law and states it better. Pain follows the evil thought "as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage"; happiness follows the pure one "like a shadow that never leaves him." And small things add up: "Even by the falling of water-drops a water-pot is filled."
But the same canon carries the correction, and it is sharper than anything the speakers said. A wanderer called Moliya Sīvaka asked the Buddha about teachers who held that whatever a person feels, "all that is caused by previous action." The Buddha answered with a list. Some feelings arise from bile, some from phlegm, some from wind, some from the three combined, some "by change of climate," some from careless behavior, some from injury — and some from the results of kamma.
"…then they go beyond what they know by themselves and what is accepted as true by the world. Therefore, I say that this is wrong on the part of these ascetics and brahmans."Sīvaka Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 36.21, tr. Nyanaponika Thera
A hailstorm is a change of climate. The farmer in the hail is the Sīvaka Sutta in a farmer's hat. The text got there first, and it gets the credit first.
The Pali is more careful than the speakers in two more ways. In the salt-crystal sutta the Buddha rejects the claim that "in whatever way a person makes kamma, that is how it is experienced": a grain of salt leaves a cup of water "unfit to drink" and changes nothing in the Ganges. The same deed lands differently depending on who does it. And elsewhere the precise working-out of the results of kamma is one of four things not to be conjectured about at all, because conjecturing "would bring madness & vexation." A tradition built on kamma tells you not to do the arithmetic.
The Bible corrects itself the same way. "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … but time and chance happeneth to them all." And when the disciples meet a man born blind, they ask the reversed law's question exactly: "who did sin, this man, or his parents?" Jesus refuses both answers: "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents."
So I don't tear up the list after all. I move it. The weather was on that old list, and the weather does flatten honest men's harvests; some of the list was real. What was wrong was not the list but the single column.
The exercise for session eleven is one page with two columns. On the left: what I'm reaping that I planted. On the right: what came that I didn't plant.
The left column is the mirror, and the mirror is the right tool there: change it. Frankl is blunt about this column. A cancer that can be cured by surgery "must not be shouldered by the patient as though it were his cross. This would be masochism rather than heroism."
The right column is the farmer's, and the mirror is the wrong tool there. Nothing in it is a verdict on you. What is yours in that column is not the crop but the stand you take toward it: "what matters above all," in Frankl's words, "is the attitude we take toward suffering." That is the second arrow, and Job's demand.
Filling in the columns takes ten minutes. The work is noticing what you put in the wrong one. A man who files the hail under what I planted has become his own Job's comforter. A man who files his own idleness under what came has kept my old list. From the inside, both errors feel like honesty.
Then, and only then, ask the question the session is named for. Why me? For the left column there is an answer, and it is in the mirror. For the right column the honest answer is the farmer's: nothing. It's that kind of planet. And the next question is not why. It is what now.
One page. Two columns. What I'm reaping that I planted. What came that I didn't plant. Then find one line in the wrong column, and move it.