Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Live the Journey

Life is not a journey to the grave, with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty, well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming ... WOW! What a ride! -Unknown

The one lesson that seems to keep coming back over and over again is this: life is about the journey, not the destination. After all, while we don't know what we will find after we leave this life, we do know that some day that time to leave will come. As many wise people before me have said, when that time comes it will not matter what we owned or how far we climbed a corporate ladder. It won't matter how many nights we laid awake torturing ourselves for past mistakes or how many times we regretted a decision not made. What will matter is how many souls we blessed by embracing life and living it with courage, passion, and love.

When we focus on destinations we can easily lose sight of what is really meaningful. Goals, achievements, praise, and possessions can all be nice stops along the path. Sometimes they can be important motivators to keep us moving along. However, they can also become distractions, black holes that suck up our energy and leave us feeling empty. If we become too dependent on the praise of others or the milestones of a particular system, we often miss the deep pleasure of experiencing the world around us.

Pause in your reading for a moment and imagine the perfect trail ride. There's you, and your horse. Maybe you're alone or maybe you're with your dog or your best friends, or large group at a ranch. Perhaps this is a memory of a ride that really happened, or possibly it is a blossoming of your imagination. Spend a few moments on this ride. Look around. See the grasses and trees. Soak in the vistas. Hear the songs of the birds and the sounds of the animals. Feel the connection to your horse.

Now come back, and consider these questions: in those moments of enjoyment, did it matter where you were going? Was your vision filled with schedules and checkpoints? I'm guessing not. I'm wagering that just the being was enough, that in those moments you were open to the joy of the experience without needing to tie it into the framework of materialism. And wasn't that wonderful? Maybe every day can be like that, if even just for a few minutes at a time.

When we consider life as a journey we begin to open to the world of possibilities that surrounds us. Journeys are about taking chances, having adventures, connecting with others, and experiencing in news ways. When we worry about having or getting stuff, whether material or ethereal, we then become burdened with the need to keep it. On the other hand, if all we seek to gain is a fuller experience of life, we can set ourselves free from the suffering that accompanies this holding.

In teaching myself to emphasize the journey versus the destination, I try to orient towards the feelings I want in an experience, rather than the outcomes I might imagine. If I am working with a horse on understanding the rein aids, I don't start out with an image of the way the turns will look when we're done. If I do that, I have locked myself in and can't be open to the experience. Instead, I try to hold in my entire body the feeling of the softness I want in the connection between us. Then I can take what he gives me, and be open to giving him what he needs in return.

When we fixate on goals and achievements we lock ourselves in. We become prisoners of our vision of how things "should" be. In that frame, it becomes very hard to love things for how they are. Since we cannot control life any more than we can control a thousand pounds of horse that doesn't want to play along, the only rational thing we can do is learn to take what life gives us, and to give back whatever we can.

How do we find the sense of what we want our lives to feel like? Go back to the trail ride for a moment. That feeling was there. It's other places too. Maybe it's in the joy of a child's laughter, or the tenderness in a loved one's eyes. Possibly it's in the excitement leaving home for a trip or the deep flavor of an exquisite meal. I can't tell you where you will find it or what form it will take. But I can give you a name for it: passion, joi de vive, that which makes you excited to get out of bed in the morning and go find wonder in the day.

The work of life is to cultivate that passion. Sometimes cultivating our passion will feel like watering a seed that seems it will never sprout, but consider this: there is a type of bamboo that is grown in India that must be planted and then tended for two full years before it suddenly bursts forth from the ground and grows to a height of sixty feet in just a few weeks. You, too, could carefully tend your passion for two years, and find it suddenly bursts forth at the right moment.

Other times, our passion may grow so strong that we must pluck the fruit from its trees and prepare a feast for others, lest it go rotten inside of us. Just as a gardener has tasks to perform throughout the whole year so the plot will be strong and healthy, so we can always tend to our passions, no matter what season we seem to be in.

Embrace this life, and fear not putting your foot forward and stepping on its path. Keep your gaze open and your eyes up so you can see all the beauty of the world. Don't hesitate to give from the heart, as you will always get it back a hundred fold if you are open to receiving. Connect with others, and know that we strengthen each other. Express the artist in you any way you can.

Live.