Doing the Right Thing

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to an opinion article.  The title of the article was pretty provocative, and I admit to some curiosity.  So I took the time to read the information.  You can read it too, if you are so inclined: We Hate You Now.  It is, of course, about COVID-19 and people's behavior and reactions to it.  I normally try to steer well clear of the pandemic in this blog for three reasons.  First, I have no expertise related to pandemics or diseases.  Second, everyone is probably bombarded with information about the pandemic already, so they certainly don't need to read about it here.  And finally, I can't think of any other current issue that has caused so much controversy and destroyed so many relationships.  I'm not interested in dealing with that level of responsibility on this blog.  But in this case, I think the article raises a concept that connects to the way I want to work with my horse.

My sense after reading the opinion is that the author is very angry.  Like deeply, in-his-soul angry at people that he believes have not been "doing the right thing."  The kind of anger that eats at a person and destroys relationships and permanently alters a world view.  That is a big deal, especially if lots of other people feel the same way.  Which apparently they do, judging from other comments on Facebook.

I don't know if you feel this way or something similar or very different.  I do know that everyone I know personally has reacted to the pandemic in different ways, and I don't like the idea of invalidating anyone's feelings, because we feel what we feel.  But this level of anger and hatred concerns me more than a little.  It concerns me because it really limits our ability to heal from what has become a worldwide crisis.  It concerns me because it is clearly destroying relationships now and will continue to do so in the future.  It concerns me because people who feel this intensity of negative emotion give off an aura to those around them, and it can create a vicious cycle.  And it concerns me because when there is this much anger and hatred in your soul, what positive emotions are left for the animals around you?

I recently listened to a podcast by Warrick Schiller with Mark Rashid, and one of my takeaways from Mark Rashid is that you can't change the way you work with horses without changing yourself and the way you do everything.  You cannot have softness with your horse if you don't practice softness with your kids, or your spouse, or even the way you pick up a coffee cup.  Being mentally balanced with horses requires being mentally balanced within yourself.  I don't think the kind of anger and hate in an article entitled, "We Hate You Now," has any place in a mentally balanced person.  

Another thing that Mark and Warwick talked a lot about in the podcast was getting rid of judgment, for horses and for people.  Warwick did another podcast - I can't remember which one - where he went into detail about a technique his therapist recommended that involved putting some tiny stones in his pocket and moving them to his other pocket whenever he had a judgmental thought.  He joked that he thought maybe he would have about three judgmental thoughts during the day, but it turned out he had something like 22 before breakfast.  His point was that we don't even realize how often we are judging ourselves, other people, and our horses.  And to get to the point where we can work well with our horses, we have to work on getting rid of those judgmental thoughts - in all forms.

But what about when it comes to "doing the right thing."  I mean, is it OK to judge people and then take that judgment into anger and even hate when you know that those people are not doing the right thing?  I can't answer that question for you.  But I can answer that question for me.  It isn't.  It isn't OK for me to be so angry that I hate people that are my friends, my family, and even strangers because they are reacting differently to a situation than I am.  And the reason has significantly less to do with their behavior than it does with mine.  I can't be the person I need to be for Donut if I hate people and discard my friendships because my friends don't think and act like me.  (If I required my friends to feel the same way I do about all the things that are important to me, I would literally have zero friends.)

I want more than anything to form a connection with Donut that is just as fulfilling as the one I had with Nimo.  And I can't do that if my mind is full of anger and hate.  So I'm going to be spending the rest of my life working on that.  Working on letting go of the judgment of myself and my horse and other people.  I don't think this is something I can just flip a switch and accomplish.  Instead, much like horsemanship, it is a lifelong commitment to being more mindful and more aware of my thoughts and my emotions and my body.  

To me, a connection with my horse is worth more than any satisfaction I might get from judging someone else's behavior.  My whole life is full of being surrounded by people that don't do the right thing.  They slack off at work.  They don't follow traffic laws.  They have 23 items in the express lane.  They don't take feed their dog like I do.  They parent differently than I do.  They value different things than I do.  And if there are too many differences between me and another person or those differences make me uncomfortable, I can choose to minimize or even completely exclude that person from my life.  

But I don't want to make that exclusion based on hate.  I want it to be based on a thoughtful awareness of the value the person adds to my life in terms of helping me be the person I want to be.  I know for many people, the pandemic has overwhelmed their existence and fundamentally changed their lives in ways that may not seem that positive right now.  There can be no question that so much damage has occurred to people's lives and businesses and that damage is likely to continue for awhile.  But good things have happened too.  Nature finds a way to balance everything, and it occurs to me that there is probably a pretty good reason for that. 

So I'm going to focus less on whether or not I think someone else is doing the right thing, and focus more on whether I am doing the right thing for myself and my horse.