The Old Man Who Lost His Horse

The old shepherd's calm "how do you know?" is doing the heavy lifting in this stick. You came to the cylinder carrying a romantic situation that already has a verdict attached: the text you didn't get back, the relationship that ended badly, the person who turned out to be someone else entirely, or the connection that never quite became one. Drawing 塞翁失馬 suggests the stick is less interested in the verdict than in how quickly you reached it.

Notice what happens when you re-read the verse a second time. The shepherd doesn't deny the loss; he simply refuses to finalise its meaning. That restraint is what the stick is reflecting back at you. Right now you may be in the part of the story where the horse has run off, and every neighbour at the family dinner table has an opinion about whether you should be sad, relieved, or worried. The Average grade is honest: this isn't a verse promising that the lost person will return transformed, nor that someone better is already on the way. It's pointing to the discomfort of not yet knowing, and asking whether you can sit inside that discomfort without forcing a conclusion.

The deeper mirror here is about how you narrate your own romantic history. If every past disappointment in your story is filed under "wasted years" or "dodged a bullet", the shepherd would gently raise an eyebrow at both.