Friday, February 20, 2009

Ramblin' on

Sorry about that, I hit the wrong button. Anyway what I was going to say was that I haven't been on here since January. This is the first one for February. The time flies by doesn't it? I have been busy with water in the basement and water in the ceiling and walls. It has been fun. Its snowing again, if you haven't noticed and it's cold outside. I haven't been out much with the horses, although I have a few times in the last week or so for short periods of time. I have been working with Jake mostly. I really want him reponding to my feel and he is getting better, or I am. I rode Raven the other day and when I got on her she hadn't forgotten what we worked on last year. In fact, after working with Jake getting on her was like going from a car without power steering to one with it. It was that noticeable and she was that soft to my touch. SHe and I both need more refining, but that makes it fun. I started out rambling on but have hit on a topic. If you just ramble on you will accomplish nothing. If I get on Jake and just go off and let him go where ever he wants we will likely get nowhere except to the next patch of grass that looks good enough to eat. I will have accomplished nothing in terms of getting him soft or learning to leg yield. Instead when I ride I need to be focused on what I want to accomplish. It might be just to have a nice quiet ride, but that can only happen as I have laid the foundation of control through feel. And so it is in our lives too, don't you know? You can ramble on through the day, get up and dressed or stay in you jammies. Eat breakfast and just amble through the day, not doing anything really worthwhile and of eternal value and at the end of the day look back and think about what you have accomplished, or not. Yet, if you at least have a goal, something to get done, you can amble your way through that or around it. Sure enough though, you will hit nothing if you don't aim at something. Waddie Mitchell, cowboy poet, said of training horses, it goes for people as well, "First, I figure out my agenda. Then I make it easy to embrace that and hard to resist it." Well, the key is to have an agenda.
Its the same for all of us. If we ramble on in our words we just say a whole lot o nothin'. If we ramble on in our day, we accomplish nothin'. I gotta have a something to do and then get at it. As the Duke said, "We're burnin' daylight!" So quit ramblin' and get at it.

Jeff

Ramblin' on