Go Ahead and Quit. For a Minute.

If you’ve been involved with showing horses for any length of time, you’ve struggled at one point or another. Something you want to do isn’t going right, something you want the horse to do isn’t going right, and you look at everyone else and it all seems to come pretty easily (not accurate, they’ve struggled too, but we’re talking about you. Or possibly me.)You may even think…this is too much, it’s not fun, I’m no good and I’m quitting. At this point, you may be expecting me to say that’s not a good idea. NOPE. I’m not going to.

Sometimes it IS a good idea to take a step back. Rest and rejuvenation is an important part of a healthy life, after all. What you do with that regrouping time matters, though. You can’t sit on the couch and beat yourself up, or ruminate on how terrible things are forever. Maybe for a day or two, but not forever. That won’t help. But you can rest. Reassess the landscape. Figure out what might be going wrong…or at least what might improve the situation…and devise a new plan. It could be you need a new route, a new goal, a different set of eyes, or something as small as changing how or what you ask of the horse (or yourself) and when. If you’re not interested in changing your goal, it could even be that you may have the wrong horse for that particular time in your journey. Doesn’t make it a bad horse, just makes it the wrong one right then. And that horse could eventually be the right one.

We’ve all had some downtime this year…in some cases, it often seemed like WAY too much. But it’s also possible to use this time to our future advantage. Personally, I realized that I was actually filling my time with way too much before “this” started, which made it hard to focus on what matters most, or to even figure out what that might be. We have some time now to develop new dreams (or reformulate plans for the old ones), to figure out where the “holes in our skill sets” are, and to look ahead at how we’ll fill them.

The dumpster fire that is 2020 won’t last forever, although some of the fallout may linger for a very long time. There are clearly bad things happening, and consequences we haven’t even fully realized as yet. If you work in healthcare or other essential jobs, you’re exhausted and need and deserve rest simply to survive.

But for others, we might be able to use this time to our advantage…to think about what we want to let go of, what we want to keep and how to get where we want to be going forward.

After all, if we can adjust our attitudes and find hope and resilience after this year, it seems as though we could be unstoppable.