When schooling a horse, the rider is responsible for setting the horse up to succeed. Don’t ask him for hard things when he’s tired, confused, or upset. Give him generous warm up and cool down time. End on a positive note. When schooling new moves, accept and praise progress rather than insisting on perfection. Listen to him. Give him physical and mental breaks. Reward a good faith try, correct gently, and be patient.

This is just common sense horsemanship. Pester a tired horse for more than he can give or ignore his signals, and he might object dangerously. Expect progress to come too quickly and you could well end up with not only a lack of progress, but also setbacks. Safety and efficiency aside, a patient, considerate, growth mindset is also just what any healthy long-term relationship needs to thrive.

And that objective–a healthy long-term relationship–is more important than any one movement or sequence of jumps.

As I headed into camp week at the barn this year–I made a royal hash out of camp week at my last barn–I tried to treat myself like a horse. What did I need to be set up for success? Well, the obvious thing–rest–was something I could somewhat control. I stuck to a pretty early bedtime, because reveille was at 5:45 am. I did as many morning chores the night before as possible, and I just gave the whole housework thingie a week-long pass (such a sacrifice!). Writing got a pass too, albeit reluctantly (Lord Julian shakes his handsome head and sighs).

I laid in a good store of lunch-able, snackable protein, because the last thing I needed was hypoglycemia making a long, hot day worse. I brought at least a quart of icy watered down ginger ale with me and drank cold water in addition. Heat stress is cumulative. Ask any experienced horse show manager. If the show is three days long, the third day is when all those bullet-proof athletes keel over.

Several times a day, I made myself do the breathe in fast, breathe out slow routine that brings down blood pressure and kicks in the “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system. When another volunteer offered to trade my somewhat antsy horse for her steady-Eddy, I accepted the help. I did not want to be the old lady with the torn rotator cuff because, “No, that’s fine. I can handle it.” I’d been handling it for three days at that point.

I gave myself permission to keep to the side of the room during group activities, to take time outs for five minutes’ peace (nods to Mrs. Large).

So I’m the old lady who for once got strategic about an obstacle course, and managed five pretty demanding days without crying, cursing (out loud), offending my team, or letting down a horse who should have been able to depend on me. I am a little proud of myself, because a year ago, I did not manage a comparable set of challenges well at all, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could, um, get back on the horse.

Have you ever gotten back on the horse? Made yourself go back and get it right, or at least not as wrong the next time? Or have you wisely thrown in the towel when everybody was telling you to try, try again?

PS: Rough draft of the cover for A Gentleman of Very Few Words. Wheee!

About a year ago, I had a terrible, horrible, awful very bad morning, at the end of a week that included successive days of excessive heat, being physically assaulted by a program participant, crossing swords with several people in quick succession… and at the end of that week, it’s fair to say, I lost my filter. (I posted about it here.)

My pre-frontal cortex went off-line. I ranted, I demanded, I insisted, and I generally went on a verbal rampage that the people on the receiving end of my bazooka blasts did not enjoy. Neither did I, though it must be said that at no point did I raise my voice or indulge in profanity.

I know what caused my lapse of self-restraint–too many stressors piling up at once without enough time to decompress between them. The term trigger-stacking applied. Then I saw and heard a person in authority insulting another volunteer, and… thar she blows!

I can’t recall another occasion when I have expressed an upset so verbally, but there are other situations where I lose a filter of sorts. Turn me loose in a well organized garden shop, and I become Brunhilda the Huntress, tossing zinnias into my cart beside impatiens, and what the heck marigolds are heat tolerant, but then, an occasional sunflower adds a nice vertical element, and–trellis for the morning glories! Hanging baskets! ALL YOUR BLOOM-FLOWER ARE MINE!

By the time I get home, sanity returns and the rules come back on line: No more flower shopping until every single plant is in the ground and thoroughly watered, you hear me, Grace Ann?

I also grow a little heedless when I’m finishing the day with a good book. Yes, I must get up in the morning, and nobody will steal the book if I put it down and get a good night’s sleep. I nevertheless read on, confident that the Disposer of All Events made alarm clocks for people like me, and what’s one more nother-nother scene? I can read the whole book tonight I want to.

In the garden shop, the abundance of floral cheer trips some breaker in my otherwise orderly acquisition plans. I don’t go overboard at grocery stores or buying clothes or even in candy shops, but those lovely, bright, magical flowers… I want them all  forever.

And with the book, the allure is relief from my sometimes overwhelming reality, the chance to hold back the tide of responsibilities and disappointments for just a few more pages. I become enthralled with a well written yarn, and I want to stay in that enchanted place.

What makes you break or bend the rules of common sense or expected civilities? If you always, always color inside the lines, how do you do that?

You know it’s hot when…

The spring session at the therapeutic riding barn ended this week with a couple of very hot days. When that happens, we offer unmounted lessons, but many participants simply choose to stay home. The barn is not air conditioned, and neither people nor animals are acclimated to the heat yet.

I had some barn-related errands to run, so I decided to make the trip even though I wasn’t strictly needed on premises yesterday. Got in the car, cranked up the AC, tooled on over the mountain and across the valley. Such a pretty day, despite the heat.

And that attitude is not normal for me. Usually, when I drive that route, I am aware that it’s pretty countryside, but I’m also a little tense, fretting over the clock, over what I’ll teach, over the exertion of trudging around a hot (or cold) indoor arena for miles. I’m trying to make every excursion count, but days at the barn are long and tacking to-dos and errands on top of the outing can get to be too much.

I was stunned by what a different drive it was when I had nothing of any significance on my agenda. Just pretty country roads, the corn coming along (“knee high by the Fourth of July”), the winter wheat ready to come off, the alfalfa looking good… la-la-la-la…

Which led me to realize that my schedule this year has had no designated Sabbath. I don’t mean a dress up and go to church day (though that has value for many people, I know), I mean a day that reliably isn’t volunteering, authoring, house-wrangling, or to-doing. A day to sleep in, wear my play clothes, schedule nothing and nobody.

I know better. I know the writing improves for being regularly paused. That ideas need time to marinate, and that I’ve never done first rate work on a tight deadline. The notion that volunteering is a break from writing, and writing is nice quiet counterbalance to volunteering doesn’t hold as much water I’d anticipated.

A change is not as good as a rest. Hmm.

Without breaks, I get to hamster-wheeling, walking in the door and seeing all the chores I skipped to put in a long day in the riding arena. My commutes are full of blurb polishing, dramatic arc plotting, and lesson plan reviews. My writing is not the all absorbing joy I know it can be.

So this is me, cutting back at the barn to two days a week at least for summer. That was hard–they need the help, I am competent to provide it, it’s just for a couple months! But I did it, and somehow, the barn is still standing. I will again put the blog on hiatus for July (have great vacays, everybody!) This is also me, spending a day up at Deep Creek Lake with an old friend. We will just hang out and eat and drink slightly irresponsibly.

And I am trying on Take a Breather Tuesdays. Might have to shift that around some, but the reality is, if I don’t choose and indulge in a flaps down day, then I end up with days that “get away from me,” scenes I have to chuck or heavily re-write, and a commute spent fretting instead of appreciating nature’s glory.

Phooey on that. I’m going to impersonate me some lilies of the field. When and how do you Sabbath?

There is much I don’t like about summer, most notably bugs and heat. I don’t like that traffic sounds are louder because I generally have all the doors and windows to my house open. Summer is when every Yahoo in their monster pick-up has their music booming so loudly it’s bothersome even when your windows are up and so are theirs.

Summer is wildfire season, it’s drought season (more drought), it’s the-power-goes-out-because-another-tree-fell-on-the-power-lines season. Summer is lawn mowers, closely followed by weed whackers and blowers. Lordy, how did civilization lurch forward without mowers, weed whackers, and blowers? A mystery for the ages.

And yet… summer is also when the robins sing. They start around 5 am now, when it’s just getting light, and that sound, of birdsong at dawn, is sweeter to my ears than nearly anything save the laughter of children. Summer is when I can hear the cows across the lane munching grass through the long, mild nights. They are beef cows, so the babies stay with their mamas for months, and this occasions some bovine conversation from time to time, and I like that too.

I hear crickets in summer, chirping away, because for them cold weather won’t come around for at least half an eternity. Summer is when I hear the pitter-pitter-thump of kittens playing with each other out on the porch. I hear the skunks who live under the porch arguing with each other, and that is sometimes followed the pungent aroma of a skunk making an emphatic point. I kinda like the smell of skunk, if it’s upwind some.

I love the scent of honeysuckle on the evening breeze, the smell of freshly tedded grass hay, and the flavor of wild raspberries picked at peak ripeness. This too, is summer, and I suspect it all feels more precious now–the crickets and robins and moo cows–because my senses are not as sharp as they used to be. I know the day might come when I can’t hear much of anything, can’t taste much, and have little olfactory perception.

The day might come sooner than I think when my bad back or wobbly balance precludes yanking weeds, much less planting flowers all over the property. Plant ye geraniums, while ye may, Grace Ann.

If that winter should befall me, the memories of what I love about summer are going to matter much more than all the reasons I can think of to grumble about warm weather.  I will need to recall the flowers and forget the weeds, recall the birdies and forget the monster trucks.

What do you love about summer, despite the heat, bugs, and wildfires?

So there I am, tooling past fields of gorgeous first cutting hay, over the creek, around the hedgerow on the way to the therapeutic riding barn. Beautiful day. Warm, sunny, low humidity, great to be alive.

Up yonder I spot a box turtle crossing the road. Shell length is about six or seven inches, so maybe a young adult off on young adult business, but making predictably labored progress across the perilous asphalt. I am slowing my old Prius down, thinking to offer an assist to this worthy wayfarer, when the driver in the opposite lane beats me to it. He stops his white van, hops out, helps our terrapin friend to the culvert they were aiming for, and speeds along his way.

I am happy all the way to the barn (another thirty miles) because of that gesture of good will from one travel to another. The whole incident lasted maybe twenty seconds, but an hour later, I am still full of the goodness of human nature, the magic of life on earth, and a bunch of other fairy dust. I put the Guy In the White Van on my list of gratitudes that night because he did my heart such good.

And then a thought intrudes: So why didn’t you let him know that, Grace Ann? Why not a beep-beep of thanks? A thumbs up out the window? Anything to convey good wishes? Why hoard the fairy dust?

Upon reflection, even writing down gratitudes can be a little hoard-ish. That exercise ensures I end my day on a positive note, with a little inventory of hope and abundance. All to myself. Hmm.

The next day when I went to the barn, I was more on the alert for opportunities to say the words. “Thank you,” to the other volunteers, to the horses, to the lovely grass growing in the pastures, and to the rose bushes which have survived an assault of kudzu and grape vines that would have felled lesser flowers. I challenged myself to speak other words of fairy dust: “That was a big help!” or, “You do that so well.”

My thoughts are often congenial, but I don’t verbalize the warm-heartedness. What am I saving it for? My gratitude list? The first of the month? My death bed? I know some of my reticence is because I feel self-conscientious when people compliment me. I don’t know how to respond. I don’t want to brush off good wishes, but nobody owes me a pat on the back for anything, ever.

Baggage like that aside, I have also simply not made a habit of sharing a happy thought. When I’m teaching in the riding arena, I am trained to spot and affirm what’s going right. Take me out of that milieu, though, and the speak-your-joy mechanism goes silent. Going forward, I hope that, with all my biggity-pants vocabulary, I can make better use of, “Thank you!” “Much appreciated!” or simply, “What you did is wonderful.”

What do you have trouble saying?

PS For the two remaining individuals who might not know it, A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions has published in the web store, in print, and on all the retail sites!

I came across a recent article in the Washington Post about the benefits of talking to strangers (paywalled) that cited Nicholas Epley’s book, A Little More Social. When we make small talk at the bus stop or lament the lack of cambozola cheese with a fellow shopper in the dairy aisle, we end up feeling more connected to our community, safer, less stressed, more confident, and better able to tolerate uncertainty.

Even exchanging smiles or merely making eye contact can carry many of the same benefits.

My next thought was about all the ways I used to encounter strangers that are no longer part of my life: checking out books at the library, buying books, buying clothing, going out to watch a movie, banking, attending writers’ conferences, sitting in the courthouse hallway between cases… Some of the changes have to do with shifts in my life, but most are attributable to the internet.

I bank, shop for clothes, buy books, watch movies (albeit very rarely), manage continuing professional education, and check books out of the library online. This raises the possibility that it’s not just staring at screens per se that makes them problematic, and it’s not entirely the addictive and toxic design behind a lot of screen environments that causes harm, but rather, the whole issue is compounded by the sheer isolation we’ve traded for all this online “convenience.” (And doom scrolling on social is sold to us as “connection,” of course.)

I could and have shopped the rummage stores for the items on my Lord Julian covers, or I can cruise Etsy. I could go to the local library branch and browse the physical volumes, or I can just pull up Libby. I still do go to the bank to deposit checks, because I refuse to put a banking app on my phone (“Apps are spyware,” she mutters, glancing furtively to the right and left.) I avoid self-check out like it’s eight hours of elbow-grease housework, and I always chat up my checker.

The biggest way that I’ve put strangers in my life, though, is by volunteering. The cast at the therapeutic riding barn changes daily, and I might see some of the other volunteers once a month or even less frequently. They are “safe strangers,” like the checker at the grocery store, the librarian, and the bank teller. In each case, and especially at the barn, I have a place to start.

The grocery store looks busy, the bank has new flowers out front, the oldest pony in the barn has a birthday coming up. If all else fails there’s the weather. Maybe living alone has made me particularly aware of whether I’m interacting with a human or a keypad, but I think it’s pretty important for me to keep the casual, fleeting, exchanges in my life as long as I’m able to.

Do you talk to strangers? Does the lady at the coffee kiosk sometimes hear your troubles? Do you nod to the other regulars on your walking circuit? Where are the strangers in your life?

I noted elsewhere in this space that I went on weight loss drugs mostly because I  wanted to give eighty-year-old me the best shot at life and good health possible. Another decade of obesity was counter that agenda. Eighty-year-old me sometimes chimes in on my financial decisions, too. She will often tell me, “I am glad you put that money in an interest bearing account, kiddo. Inflation is a thing, and I will still need some good chocolate on my grocery list!” She also reminds me, “You can’t take it with you, and that is a worthy cause. Pony up and be grateful you can help.” The old girl speaks her mind.

Six-year-old me has different wisdom to offer. I was still wetting my bed at that age, much to my horror, but six-year-old me soldiered on any way, and learned to run a load of wash in the middle of the night. She knows what it’s like when the body just Does Things–gets morning sick for eight straight months, has migraines, loses hair, gets wrinkly–and she tells me that it’s just part of being human, and not the sum of me as a person. Cope as best you can, and keep moving forward. What a comforting view of matters.

Sixteen-year-old me goes more in the bad example column. She made stupid romantic choices, and stuck by them with ferocious stubbornness. Not to be outdone, twenty-eight-year-old me made even dumber wrong turns. I feel compassion for the loneliness and invisibility that drove my decisions at those ages, and I am also still carrying the regrets those choices inspired. Sixteen- and twenty-eight year old me have to occasionally whop me upside the head with a stout, “Don’t be like us. LEARN from your mistakes.” Tough love, I suppose.

Fifty-year-old me is agog at having signed her first publishing contract–at fifty! She wanders around grinning and telling me, “The best is yet to be!” Sometimes, I want to smack her, but her joy is so real and she just might be right. The party is far from over.

I could go on. Fifteen-year-old me was pretty selfish, and thirty-four-year-old me was seriously down. She got the notion to get her backside on a horse, and lo, that medicine still helps me keep life in a gentler perspective.

All of these incarnations of Grace are still very much with me, and I have learned from each of them. Maybe this Ages of Me view of myself is part of why I seldom feel lonely. We are busy, us girls, living life and trying to make sense of it, and that’s a team effort!

Do your previous selves and future selves ever pipe up in your life? Do they inspire, guide, or make you wince?

PS: The print version of A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions is available from Amazon, and the first batch of ebook ARCs has gone out. If you’d like an ARC file, please email me at [email protected].

I am not one to give up on a book I’m reading, but I recently set aside a biography of Frederick Douglass. It was well written, wonderfully researched, compelling, fascinating, and really, really sad. That guy struggled his whole life for a just cause–struggled to the very limits of his human endurance–and saw only inadequate progress, all but thrown away almost as soon as it was won, and now we’re backsliding on that progress again at warp speed. For my nighty-nighty reading, I am not up to the challenge of absorbing that content.

The material is important, and I will finish the book, but it cannot be my bedtime reading.

Bedtime reading, from the time I was in grade school, has been for detaching from the day, going to a place where justice triumphs, truth and courage carry the day, and love conquers all (by the end of the book). It takes about twenty minutes for a good story to reduce our stress by nearly two thirds, improve our sleep quality, enhance our vocabulary, broaden our capacity for empathy, and fortify the neural wiring that supports our capacity for critical thinking.

I need that kind of bed time reading. I also need to get my hands in the dirt. We are one third of the way through May, and I am way behind with my annuals. Playing catch up will be excellent stress reduction, and when I see the dahlias, impatiens, and geraniums all over the property, I will be very glad I spent that time out in the fresh air and sunshine. I might even bust over and get some hanging baskets.

I need to walk where it’s green and growing, in nature, such as old farmland still makes that claim. I found a woods to walk in near the horse barn, and I will be making time to stop there again as the need for shady paths grows in the coming weeks.

I need to be around animals. Domestic animals, especially, and I like seeing wild animals going about their business too. My particular friends are cats and horses, but I am very fond of dogs, bunnies, birds in the wild, and cows. (Raccoons, not so much.)

As a therapist once said to me, “If you need it to be happy, you need it.” These are elements of my life I need to be functional and happy–good bed time reading, flower gardening, walks in nature, beasts. And how wonderful for me, I can have them all right now, and that has made much of the present tumult bearable.

What simple, available measures are helping you keep your balance these days?

PS: A print version of A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions is available from Amazon. I will do the Ingram Spark print version too, but that takes a few weeks to process, and is always more expensive than the Amazon edition (blast, darn, and phooey).

I was at the horse barn this week, taking a mighty steed to his stall after a lesson, and one of the other volunteers mentioned that she was looking for a paying horse barn job. She is mid-twenties, and new to the equine scene, but a quick and enthusiastic learner who has a natural aptitude for working with horses. She was convinced that lack of experience was going to doom her ambitions.

“Don’t sell yourself short. Experience can be a real liability. For some people, experience can result in close-mindedness, an unwillingness to learn, and a tendency to cling to out-of-date practices. Give me somebody willing to work hard and learn over somebody who knew it all ten years ago. Besides, you truly love horses, and that’s worth any number of years simply making a living off them.”

She just stared at me, and then started to tear up. She’s college-educated but going through that, “Maybe my ladder has been leaning against the wrong building this whole time,” questioning which seems to accompany the quarter-life crisis

I conclude that my perspective–inexperience can be a tremendous asset–was the first encouraging word she’d had.  I could only speak from that viewpoint because I recall how easy it was to come up with a plot a hundred books ago. The ideas fell in a gentle shower, and characters whispered to me of all manner of compelling flaws and wounds. Writing life was sweet, and I had no idea what a gift my inexperience was at the time.

As I was driving home, it occurred to me that my exchange with my barn buddy was a micro-example of qualities I love about my season in life. In earlier years, I might not have been aware enough to realize my fellow volunteer was asking for reassurance in the first place. In the second, I would not have had a ready argument against experience as the sine qua non. Of course, the ideal employee will have some experience, and also an open mind and a willingness to work hard, in addition to a heart for horses, but that wasn’t the point to make at the time.

I have made good hires and bad, I have been a good hire and a poor fit. I have needed encouragement, and been given some when I didn’t expect it. I’ve also been dismissed, ignored, and told my dreams were ridiculous. I hope all this living has made me a kinder, less self-centered person. If nothing else, all this living has made me want to be a kinder, less self-centered person, and I will never be too old to strive in that direction.

What do you like about your current season in life?

If you want to see me shoot around the room backward with flames pouring out of my nose, just tell me, “We are each responsible for our own happiness.” I’m not sure why I get all riled up at this phrase, but I suspect it has something to do with representing myriad foster children who went from lousy homes to lousy foster homes (maltreatment in foster homes is estimated conservatively at 25% of placements), while being told they should be grateful to have any roof over their heads.

Or it has to do with rampaging cow elephant menstrual cramps for which no medication was supposedly effective until I was well into adulthood and then it was available only with a prescription. I am talking “pass out from the pain” cramps. Every month from age twelve.

Or it has do with South Sudan, Gaza, on and on and on.

I do believe that I am responsible for accepting and managing my feelings. I am responsible for my actions. I am responsible, if I’m miserable, for trying to change that. I type those words, though, from a place of enormous, multi-faceted privilege. I am relatively healthy, I am solvent (finally, for now), I am white, I am single, I am dwelling where the air and water are pretty clean, I was taught to read and write… all good things, but even somebody with all those high cards can get wrapped into an abusive relationship, poverty, disease, or all three at once.

To me, telling that unfortunate person that they are sad, overwhelmed, anxious, and cynical because they just “choose” to focus on the negative is hubris beyond description. It’s a variety of victim shaming and blaming masquerading as a truism, and one that excuses abusers, wealth hoarders, and snake oil salesmen from the consequences of their actions.

So, this is me with my nose aflame. I’ve posted a similar rant about “Ma’am, just calm down.” (Flames out my ears). I am also no great fan of, “What do you learn on your good days?” though that one (of which my mother was fond) doesn’t quite rise to the level of flames. Can’t we just have a bad day from which no Calvinistic sermon must be wrung? And I give, “No job worth doing is easy,” a side-eye, mostly because my mom used that to describe parenting me.

Lots of jobs worth doing are delightful–arranging flowers to take to a friend, baking brownies for the office, walking the dog, sending a get well card… even writing ranty-blog posts can be a pure joy, especially the part about looking for pet pictures to go with the words.

What received wisdom grates on you? What aphorism do you hear with an inward side-eye? “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger”? “If at first you don’t succeed…?”