Rotational Falls Happen

Huh…rotational fall…sounds familiar.

Seeing the main objective (the finish line), knowing whom you would like to reach that objective with (your horse), and then hitting the fence…and everything spins (haha, hence rotational) fiercely out of your control.

Sometimes you come out okay…sometimes you lose the horse…

….. Sometimes you lose the rider.

Recommended course of action – clear the fences. (As if it was that easy all the time.) Sometimes you get over them, sometimes you just have to go around them…so long as you reach the final objective with whom you’d planned.

You Are Now Leaving Hope...

People often say that we live up to our own expectations. What you don’t hear is how often other people live up to our expectations.

To have an expectation is to expect, with a high degree of certainty that something will take place. As such, we tend to prepare ourselves for the expected. Expecting parents make arrangements to welcome their baby into the world. Expecting graduates make preparations to begin their new career. These are things they are expecting and likewise preparing for.

So…is it wrong to place expectations on other people?

At what point in time did we decide that expecting a baby and expecting someone to call are the same? Did a doctor give you a sonogram of the phone call ready to be made? Of course not. A phone call requires the action of another person…another person who has their own expectations and even more frightening, their own will. So no, we shouldn’t place expectations on other people. They can do what they want, when they want. If we expect certain things from them, we may just be setting ourselves up for disappointment.

….but we still do, don’t we?

That’s the thing. We have begun placing expectations where we use to place something else. Oh what’s that? Oh…right…it’s called hope.

Similar to expectations, hope is expecting something to happen, only with very little certainty that it will actually come into fruition. We’ve seen words being mixed up before; http://notforspectators.blogspot.com/2008/01/slapped-with-it-again.html#links. Just as we previously found that people mix up the word ‘want’ with ‘need’ people mix up ‘hope’ with ‘expect’. We prepare for things we want people to do or say, as if we know for a fact that they are doing to follow through. Of course, when they don’t we become devastated.

Imagine how much more we would avoid being hurt or disappointed if we only place hopes on people instead of expectations?

*sigh*
Hope has tragically died at the treacherous hands of expectation…May it rest in peace.

Thought for the day…

Insanity…doing the exact same thing over and over again…expecting different results.

The only difference between an insane person and a genius is that while a genius does something to amaze people, an insane person inconveniences them.

A guy who digs through people's trash and eats them. (Insane)

A guy who digs through people's trash, glues it together and labels it art. (Genius)

To Trust or To...Screw It?

Trust is a scary thing.

In order to fully trust someone you have to completely make yourself vulnerable to getting hurt. We’ve all experienced being hurt by someone we thought we trusted.

With horses they tell you never to trust them. As soon as you trust them you let your guard down and get hurt. I have to respectfully disagree with this common belief. Riding is a partnership; you have to trust each other. Let me explain.

Horses naturally avoid water of which they cannot judge the depth of. It’s a self-preservation instinct. A puddle no wider than four feet could literally be an endless pit of painful death…to a horse. We, as humans, understand that the four foot wide puddle is not an endless pit and that they can in fact walk through it and survive to annihilate their grain that night.

This is where the trust comes in. My horse trusts that I will never put him in a situation that will cause him harm. He doesn’t know for sure that at some point I won’t, but he trusts that I will protect him. Based off of past events, he is right. I’ve never given him a reason to doubt me.

In the same regards I trust him to know where his feet are at all times. I trust that he will listen to me when I pull him up from a gallop, or when I lead him down a bank he isn’t sure about. He’s 1,700 pounds; I have to trust that he won’t decide that having my on his back is the worst thing ever!

So we trust each other, and ride in harmony…every once in a while questioning each other, but always giving up the luxury of adamant knowledge for the blissfully blind trust. Things are peaceful, and everyone is happy and confident in each other. There are mistakes made, no one is perfect…but we trust each other enough to understand that the mistakes made were not in order to cause harm…perhaps just someone thinking they knew better than the other, or a simple missed judgment.

Like taking the long spot on a jump…just simple missed judgment.

Why can’t people be more like horses?