Imagine in your mind a weathered ol' guy with long gray hair, in his beard and on his head, still doing a mantra, 'she done me wrong' long after his mate had passed away. Now this is one that is a tough one to imagine, a self with a false identity. False identity needs to go and the inside person to grow if the mask of the clown, and all those it fools and sets up for false interaction, is to be corrected. Oh but how I rob myself and others by keeping focused on the small stuff like the guy who gave a finger when I slowed for the amber light instead of sharing stories with a son on our way to his school. How my vision is impaired when I allow myself to see so little, even perhaps as I bathe in righteous indignation.
Righteous fool is the result.
So these four horsemen of our own self destruction pillage our lives - when we let them. Maybe it is time, as the automobile replaced the horse, to let my life and my walk in it, replace the horsemen of the apocalypse and thereby avert a self constructed state of doom. Me thinks it is. Only when we examine their premise, as the parables above do, can we see that they create no-win situations. Apply each of the analogies to your own life.