I watched the grace with which you moved through your morning today. One wayward cow had escaped no less than 6 pastures and was finally corralled in a stall. An otherwise calm horse kicked the blacksmith, requiring your immediate attention. At that same moment, a new boarder trucked in from Ohio. In fact, you had been up at 5am to meet the truck, but they were running late. Instead of being harried you smiled and made it look simple.
I’ve observed your life evolve over the years, from a backyard barn to a professional boarding and training facility. To an outsider it appears a perfect, tranquil life with horses. The reality is the everyday stress of people constantly in your life and home, and a wedding looming in three days. On rare moments, I do detect your distance. Understandably, I see you withdraw and I respect that there must be other areas of your life that are weighing on your mind. That is human.
Whether it is a tight deadline with impossible parameters, a car that breaks down when you are running late, or a child-care situation that falls through at the last moment. Everyone deals with recalculating, re-navigating, re-charting and pushing on through the storm..
I do not practice any particular religion or faith, but I do have a favorite passage from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. He is discussing the unnaturalness of negativity and how no other life form, except humans, experiences it. The example he cites is two ducks swimming peacefully on a pond. Suddenly a fight breaks out; perhaps one duck strayed into the other duck’s private space. The fight lasts only a moment. Then the ducks swim off in opposite directions, vigorously flapping their wings. “…by flapping their wings they were releasing surplus energy, thus preventing it from becoming trapped in their body and turning into negativity. This is natural wisdom, and it is easy for them because they do not have a mind that keeps the past alive unnecessarily and then builds an identity around it.”
What if we all flapped our wings and walked away instead of harboring the negative incidents and allowing them to shape our day?
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| Ducks and Geese sharing a pond |
Therapeutic Misadventures 