Once a woman brought her son to the thirteenth-century Turkish Sufi master Nasruddin complaining that the boy had an uncontrollable sweet tooth. She asked Nasruddin to tell the boy to stop eating sweets. He said to bring him back in four weeks. When they returned he said, “Boy, I order you to stop eating sweets!” The mother asked, “Couldn’t you have said that at the beginning? Why make us wait four weeks?” “No, I couldn’t have said that even two weeks ago,” Nasruddin replied. “Why not?” asked the mother. “Because I love sweets myself. First I had to control my own love for them. Only then could I tell your son to stop eating them.”That is, words are empty unless backed by experience, says Robert Frager.
