A fable

In the early days of the Choson Dynasty
the great statesman Hwang-hui
said in a quarrel between woman servants
--  What you say is true
and what you say is true.

His wife standing nearby,
seizing on the ambiguous equivocation,
remarked,
--  Your wife is true, too.

In my younger days I could never fathom
Hwang-hui's inner thoughts
and simply took it for some kind of joke,
but now I keep discovering how similar to him
I myself have become in this world.

It was not that he meant that those women's words
were relatively true, or that he could not tell
if they were good or bad,
he did not speak with an intention or calculation
to sidestep or appease,
but he had come to understand that
all human opinions and wisdom are always imperfect,
and I understand and sympathize with his decision
to suspend judgement for that reason.