This story comes from Japan, and is only a few hundred years old:

A girl became pregnant in the village where lived a much-revered teacher. To protect the young man who was the father of the child, the girl told her parents that the child was in fact the teacher's.

In great indignation, the parents of the girl took the baby to the teacher and told him, "This is your child -- you must look after it!" "Is that so?" said the teacher.

It was a great deal more difficult for him to live by begging when the villagers heard what had happened, but somehow the teacher obtained enough for himself and the baby. And then the girl, burdened with guilt, revealed the real name of the child's father to her parents.

They once more visited the teacher with profuse apologies and asked for the return of the child, saying they accepted that it was not his. "Is that so?" said the teacher, handing over the baby.

Some authorities have noted that "Is that so?" is a poor translation. The Japanese phrase is really just a "social noise" -- a way of maintaining a conversation, as we might say "Uh-huh."

It's a bare story. We cannot know how the teacher felt -- when he was first accused, when he began to fend for the child, whether he developed affection for it, whether he was sad when it was taken away again .... But we know what he did. We know that he accepted.

The last three Steps are a journey of discovery, a journey which -- in the world's terms -- may sometimes be happy, sometimes sad, and very often neither. The revelations that come to us as a result of our practice are invitations to acceptance, not some exalted pathway to nirvana. To each episode in our lives, Steps 10, 11 and 12 invite us to respond: "Is that so?"