Yes, in fact, I do worry. You could call me a worrywart, stressmonkey, doomsdayer, worst case scenario thinker, and pessimist. I am rather like Aunt Josephine in the movie Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events:
Having a horse is probably not a good idea for me, because there are an infinite number of things that can go wrong with a horse. I don’t just worry about the usual stuff, like my horse tearing a suspensory or colicking. I have visions of drive-by shootings, and of drownings whenever we ferry the horses across Lake Champlain. If worrying about your horse were a World Equestrian Games event, I would win a gold medal.
Of course there are many things that can go wrong just at the barn, but when you add trail riding in, there are so many more! I recently started taking my turn at the wheel with the horse trailer in tow and that supplied a whole cornucopia of new things to worry about. Like, has my horse turned himself upside down in the stall? Is the car passing me going to get in a head-on collision with the other car that just appeared? How would we get the horses out if the trailer flipped?
I am – obviously – not qualified to give advice on how to get your fears under control. But neither are people who naturally don’t worry about anything because, to be honest, they just don’t get it.
I have learned a thing or two, though, about worry and fear. From my own experience and also from watching horses.
First of all, when I reflect on all the things I have worried about in my life and ask myself, “how many of these things have actually happened?” the answer is: close to zero.
Secondly, my worries have no relationship to actual risk. The most likely bad thing to happen related to my horse is that I get injured while riding, yet I don’t worry about this (probably because I have never been badly injured while riding). Instead, I worry about extremely unlikely things, like a barn fire. There are many things in life I am not afraid of. I am not afraid of flying and when there is turbulence I don’t worry, even in a single engine prop plane. I am not afraid of camping in bear country. I am not afraid of kayaking in 3-foot waves in dense fog off the coast of Maine. I am not afraid to get on a horse I have never ridden before. I think that my worry is proportional to how much I care about something or someone. My own injury or death doesn’t worry me nearly as much as my horse’s. I am not a hypochondriac about myself, but I am about by horse.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I did not fully understand this until I had two experiences that made it very clear. I was in India and a friend offered me his car and driver to visit the Taj Mahal, a 4-hour drive from Delhi. If you have ever been to India you know that the roads are a cacophony of cars, trucks, donkey carts, bicycles, and pedestrians all vying for space. [Although the video below is of a motorcyclist, this is basically how everyone in India drives.]
We were on a road going almost 70 miles per hour, weaving around buses, rickshaws, and every form of transport imaginable. We passed a dead bicyclist and a truck on its side. My pleas to the driver to slow down went unheeded. It was the most terrified I had ever been in my life.
Just a few weeks later I was in Tibet and one night I was awoken by a loud bang that sounded like an explosion. I felt concrete falling on top of me. I assumed that I was about to be buried and die, so I cocooned my head in my arms and held still. I was strangely calm. There was no fear at all, no terror, no worry. [It turned out that a water tank on the roof had collapsed and although chunks of concrete were falling on me and I needed stitches, I was not buried alive.]
Why was I terrified in the first incident and totally calm in the second? In the first situation I was anticipating that something terrible was going to happen, but in the second, something terrible actually was happening. I think that when a bad event is occurring, we accept and deal with it. Of course there is suffering, but it is not the paralyzing unproductive suffering that fear is.
The things we worry about are very personal, just like they are for horses. My horse Tupelo is afraid of smoke, but he willingly wades into a pond. Kerrie’s horse Prophet has no problem with smoke, but is afraid of ponds. Horses also remind us that having a friend nearby can really help calm our fears. Just as Tupelo might say to Prophet to calm him down, “Dude, it’s okay; see, I’m wading in the pond and not dying,” Kerrie might say to me “Horse Trail Chick, just stay in your lane and let the other drivers take care of themselves and we’ll be fine.”
Here is Prophet (the gray whose ears you see in the foreground) calmly following Tupelo into the water – a huge feat for him.
Worry compounds itself. When I leave the barn and perseverate on some worry about my horse all the way home, I am more likely to fear that someone has broken into my house and is hiding in the basement. If I am not worried when I leave the barn, I walk into my house without a care.
We know that to desensitize our horse to something, we need to expose him or her to it repeatedly, in a gentle and gradual manner, until they realize it won’t harm them. It’s the same for us. I was afraid of the dark into my mid-twenties. Then, one summer I lived in a tepee deep in the woods. Many nights I had to walk home in the pitch dark when I’d forgotten my flashlight. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was convinced that someone was waiting to attack me every night (irrationality is the nature of a phobia, after all). Several months went by. One day I realized that I had walked the woods a hundred times and not, in fact, been attacked. It was an astounding revelation. From that moment on, I have not been afraid of the dark.
The good news is that, as much as I worry, my fears don’t usually stop me from doing something important to me. The definition of courage is “the ability to do something that frightens one.” I have taken risks in my life such as quitting my “real” job to go to woodworking school, moving to an extremely remote village in Alaska – sight unseen, and sometimes exposing my vulnerability in ways many people wouldn’t.
Worry and fear suck, but not living your life sucks more. Yes, be careful and don’t take stupid risks, but also don’t let stupid worries paralyze you.
[Fear of riding after a bad riding accident is something altogether different, and this post is in no way intended to belittle these very legitimate fears. I have not experienced this but I can only imagine how difficult it would be to overcome. My words here are intended only to poke fun at myself for my exaggerated and irrational fears.]
Monica
