The Mule and His Shadow

A traveler, having hired a mule and its owner as a guide for a long desert crossing, stopped in the blistering midday heat, desperate for shade with nothing around but the mule itself. He sat down in the narrow strip of shadow the animal cast, only for the guide to insist that since he had only hired the mule itself for the journey, not its shadow, the traveler had no right to sit there.

The traveler, equally stubborn, argued that renting the mule surely included whatever it naturally produced, shadow included, and the two fell into a furious, escalating argument over a strip of shade barely large enough for one man to sit in.

While they argued, consumed entirely by their pointless quarrel, the mule — startled by their shouting and left completely unwatched — bolted and ran off into the desert, taking with him both the shade they were fighting over and the very transportation the traveler had actually needed all along. The two men, still arguing, looked up to find they had lost everything by fighting so fiercely over something so small.