Riding the Horse

Who will you be a year later?

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Are you the person you were a year ago? Did you mean to be different? It’s actually strange to think of who we were one year ago and in what ways we may or may not have changed, either by happenstance or by design.
 
I intended to become a person who “rode the horse in the direction it was going”* more often. What I meant by that is I would stop pushing back so strenuously against reality when it presented me with a circumstance I didn’t like or want. This would include all manner of things from schedules that don’t stay nailed down, unpleasant tasks that need to be done, rifts I can’t fix, medical outcomes I can’t change and so on and so forth ‘til death do we part.
 
There was some success which I tracked for about 5 months. And then toward the end of 2023 I figured out that “riding the horse in the same direction” was better expressed as simply “being in harmony with nature.” Of course, what being in harmony with nature meant in any one instance was open to interpretation. Was nature truth? Was nature reality? Despite the wide-open ambiguity, I found I usually had some gut-level sense of what being in harmony with nature meant. For instance, I knew in my gut, literally in my gut, that slivering off a narrow strip from the middle of my partner’s sandwich as I was making it in the morning was not harmonious. I’d been doing this for many years, possibly up to 10 or even more. That has to equal many, many sandwiches. Maybe even 100.
 
This is ridiculous, I told myself on the morning I recognized the disharmony of this behavior. It doesn’t even make sense. I can just make myself a tiny little two-bite sandwich if I want – or a whole one!
 
So, I did. I dedicated a piece of bread to this ritual, slivering off just enough each morning to make a two-biter. It was terrible. Not tasty or compelling at all. I felt cheated and briefly entertained the idea of just going back to my disharmonious ways. Instead, I did the harmonious but surprisingly hard thing: I asked Gary if I could have two tiny little mouse bites of his sandwich every day. I set the conversation up by first asking him if he’d noticed over the years that I’d been shorting his sandwich. He looked totally confused.
 
“You mean you’ve been only giving me half a sandwich?” he asked. He has no frame of reference for this sort of fraud.
 
“Of course not,” I said. “That would be so obvious. I take a ¼ inch margin from the middle when I cut your sandwich in half,” I said, going into some detail about how I took special care to avoid air pocket holes or other surface details that wouldn’t match up. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with this information.
 
“But now I want to be more in harmony with nature so I need your permission. So…can I continue to take slivers out of the middle of your sandwich?”
 
“Of course,” he said with no hesitation at all. He’s totally generous with food.
 
“Okay, thanks.” Then I stall for a few moments. “One more thing.” This was the part I really dreaded having to spell out. “On peanut butter & jelly days, do you mind if I squeeze out the excess peanut butter? Don’t worry; I load it up with extra just for this purpose.”
 
He looks briefly alarmed but composes himself quickly.
 
“You’re welcome to do that, too.” He pauses. It’s a little awkward. “Do you want me to sign something?” he says.
 
“No,” I say. “I’m good. I think I’ve achieved harmony.”
 
Being in harmony with nature feels a bit more straightforward so far as food and the like are concerned. My plan for 2024 is to discover what this abstract idea means across all dimensions of life. To ensure my intention doesn’t get lost, each day I’ll make a mental note of 1 – 5 instances in which I responded to life in a way that was harmonious with nature. I’ve already got 1 under my belt for today after correcting a disharmonious reaction to a Facebook post. (I corrected it with love. I saw no other way out plus the clock was ticking. It turns out love is pretty efficient.)
 
As we all enter 2024 and think ahead about where we want to be and who we want to be a year from now, it occurs to me that a big part of being in harmony with nature is actually about being in harmony with ourselves. If you had to give an answer, what does “being in harmony with yourself” mean for you?
 
Many blessings to you and yours in 2024.
 
E
 
 
*I wrote about “Riding the Horse in the Right Direction” in January of 2023 in this column called Abracadabra.
 
Some Food for Thought
 
“This year you can seize the opportunity to repeatedly do the actions that help you become the person who you want to be regardless of what is going on in the world around you,” says time management coach Elizabeth Grace Saunder.
 
Or, as Mahatma Gandhi puts it:
 
Your beliefs become your thoughts.
Your thoughts become your words.
Your words become your actions.
Your actions become your habits.
Your habits become your values.
Your values become your destiny.