A traveler demanded speed. The bridge keeper offered a lesson.
A traveler in a hurry thrust a coin toward the old bridge keeper and demanded the gate be lifted at once. The keeper turned the coin in his fingers as if reading a story in its scratches and said, “You will cross either way, but which crossing will cross you?” Annoyed, the traveler snatched back his coin and tried the river ford downstream; in the shallows he lost a wheel, a day, and the certainty that speed was progress. Mud-streaked, he returned to find the gate already open and the keeper not looking for his coin. “A coin buys the bridge,” the old man said gently, “but patience buys the arrival.” The traveler placed the coin on the keeper’s table anyway, not as payment, but as a reminder to himself that some price is not about money at all.
