The Joy of Falling Off a Horse and Landing Hard on Your Ass

I don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve and avoid making resolutions like its the plague (or Covid19). New Year’s Eve is usually a night people act desperately stupid and are, to my mind, oddly celebrating another year gone from their lives. A year that they will never get back and a year in which they will have failed to keep any one of their tedious New Year resolutions. To make a truly impactful resolution one needs to be able to self reflect on ones’ life and therein lays the problem. Rarely do people truly and honestly reflect on their lives. Self reflection can be painful and takes some effort. We humans are a lazy lot and it is human nature to avoid pain. So for most people New Year’s resolutions are a “make yourself feel good” pointless activity. This year however, I realized what my New Year’s resolution will be every year going forward; find a horse and fall off that horse.

Yes, I have fallen off a literal horse and it was the best thing that ever happened when I was learning to ride. Once I fell off I learned that I was right, falling off and hitting the ground hurt. It actually hurt quite a bit, but the pain ended and I actually lived to climb back up on that horse. It was the upside of falling that I never considered before the Fall. I now knew what the Fall felt like and the results were not horrible at all. My riding improved without that nagging underlying fear of what it would be like to get hurt falling. I now knew that a fall was survivable and might just lead to something valuable. In this case confidence in myself.

So my new forever resolution; avoid safe spaces at all costs and every year find a horse and try my hardest to fall off. A horse can be anything that you are nervous about doing, trying, exploring, or just experiencing. It could be as small as sliding down a hill face first on an inner tube, jumping out of plane or singing in front of strangers or as big as changing jobs. So find yourself a horse and then try your best to fall off that horse. Here is to a landing on your ass and laughing with joy.