The Dervish and the Three Coins

For the low, low price of three coins, you can get four pieces of wisdom!

Hello, reader. Since it's still winter, I thought we'd look at a tale from Turkey where it's warmer. Today's tale is The Dervish and the Three Coins. We learn several life lessons in this tale.

As this story opens, we have a merchant who is not good at managing his money. When he's down to just three coins, he takes all of his money and leaves his family. So far, I'm not seeing a great guy. Because of his shame, he abandons his family and leaves them with nothing. He needs to get his priorities checked. Then, when he finds a dervish, the merchant gives over all of his money to learn some wisdom. This worked out well for him in this story, but I was pretty worried for the merchant's family for a moment. I'm guessing the dervish was trying to get the merchant to see that wisdom is more useful than money, but it could have ended pretty badly for our main character.

As it turned out, it worked out really well for our merchant. Remembering the four pieces of advice the dervish gave him, the merchant was able to make much more money and return home a rich man. By this point, he had been gone for several days with no word to his family, so when the merchant meets a neighbor on the way home and he learns that his wife is looking at other men, I wasn't too surprised.

Let's look at this from her perspective. She probably had to assume he was dead and in order to keep her family alive, she needed to be married to someone, or go live with someone in her family. There was a real sleezeball who apparently started courting her just about the day her husband left. So, this woman's sister took her in. It was the closest thing to a restraining order they could get. Thank goodness for kind-hearted sisters, otherwise this story would have gotten very complicated.

While we can learn the four morals, or pieces of wisdom, the merchant learned, I prefer to think the moral is: Manage your business well and life will be a lot easier.