A young apprentice was learning the art of flying daggers from a master.

“Master, when can I have my own daggers?”, he asked.

“If you catch the daggers I throw at you, they’re yours”, she replied.

She then threw the dagger at him.

The first dagger came so fast, he avoided it out of fear.

The second one too.

The third dagger he tried to catch, but failed, and got cut instead.

Countless flying daggers later, all he had were cuts and no daggers of his own.

“Stop! I give up”, he said.

“No, I’ll keep throwing daggers until you catch one”, the master replied.

She let fly another dagger.

Pinned in a corner, the apprentice had no choice but to try catching it.

He got cut again.

But this time, he caught the dagger, just barely.

However, without a break, another dagger flew at him.

Instinctively, he used the dagger he caught to deflect it.

He kept deflecting until he mustered the courage and strength to catch another.

And another.

Eventually, he got the hang of it, and was catching daggers with ease.

With each dagger caught, his set of daggers grew.

Now, he has his own daggers, each uniquely crafted for different situations.

Life is the same.

She keeps throwing daggers of challenge at us.

We can try to avoid them and remain unscathed.

Or we can try to receive them. We might fail. We might get hurt.

But we’ll also learn.

It might take a few tries, but eventually, we’ll catch a dagger of experience.

Then, we can use it when a similar situation arises.

And as we catch more daggers, the more situations we can tackle.

So catch those flying daggers.

If you found this useful, please cite this write-up as:

Yan, Ziyou. (Dec 2020). Catch the Flying Daggers. eugeneyan.com. https://eugeneyan.com/writing/flying-dagger/.

or

@article{yan2020dagger,
  title   = {Catch the Flying Daggers},
  author  = {Yan, Ziyou},
  journal = {eugeneyan.com},
  year    = {2020},
  month   = {Dec},
  url     = {https://eugeneyan.com/writing/flying-dagger/}
}