How to dismount gracefully: PART ONE

I am reminded of an earlier post I wrote which headlined "When you realise you are riding a dead horse the best strategy is to dismount".https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/when-you-find-riding-dead-horse-your-best-strategy-dismount-murphy/

I am not sure the ‘dead horse metaphor is completely accurate in this instance, however the ‘dismounting’ strategy applies all the same. 

Learning to dismount gracefully and with dignity is something all humans need to learn to do preferably whilst we are young! However, some of us need a refresher especially when we are heading into the ‘final quarter’ of the game. Er... that would include me I am afraid.

In my case the metaphoric horse has been in cardiac arrest for some time and it has taken a while for me to recognise the problem.   Recognising the truth can be difficult, it usually has made several attempts to get our attention however the avoidance gene is also well honed .. But truth, like water from a leaking pipe, never disappears it just finds a new crack to seep through to reach the surface.

When the messages are not heeded there are some dramatic dismounts that we can observe, here are a few you will recognise I am sure:

The hip and shoulder shove –whether well-meaning or devious plot – the hip and shoulder dismount comes out of the blue and lands you hard on your backside with an unceremonious thud! At first you are in shock unaware of how you found yourself looking up from the grass wondering what just happened!  

Another common dismount is the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ technique where your removal from the horse has been known by almost everyone but yourself. Think Theresa May, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  

And then there is  the shotgun dismount; This is when the horse is at full gallop and you are holding the reins tightly, the wind is flying through your hair and in one fell swoop -the horse drops dead from under you allowing you to fly forward over the top in mid-air making a spectacular 360 tumble head first. We might liken this dismount to Bill Shorten’s spectacular recent election loss when the horse appeared to be rounding the final bend way ahead of the pack and the finish line only seconds away only to drop dead metres from the finish line leaving more than just the rider baffled and bewildered.

And finally and most common of all, the horse that went lame  years ago and has almost come to a complete stop in the middle of the paddock refusing to eat   – yet still the rider  clings to the saddle urging the horse forward when the kindest approach might be euthanasia ( the horse I mean).

The universe has uncanny ways of communicating that change is approaching however we must listen attentively in order to hear these messages, most of us don’t or if we do, we don’t believe what we have heard. We don’t trust our gut. This may be in the form of a stubborn virus that your body won’t recover fully from or just a low level sense of malaise and anxiety that sits in the pit of your stomach.  

The warning messages for me have been filling up the ‘in box’ for a while now but I have just applied blinkers and kept applying the whip to my long suffering horse.   But recently I received a message that was impossible to miss – it came in the form of a rogue complaint and the subsequent abandonment by my employer to back me up. I was treated poorly - it was as if there was a neon message flashing; “get off the bloody horse you idiot”!   This was a final dramatic neon billboard that came after a long slow death of a thousand cuts. I just had refused to look.

Possibly a better description of this experience is given by Joseph Campbell in his lifetime’s research work on what he called ‘the Hero's Journey' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey - he described this change or critical point of departure as ‘the call to action’ where the hero’s ordinary world has been changed through a dramatic turn of events; a loss of a loved one, an illness, a redundancy and so on, which throws our hero out of their familiar world into a new and initially alien world where they are challenged and where they have to face all their fears (dragons).  Campbell sees this as a cyclical journey in four predictable stages – which always begins with the call to action and ends with the return of our hero back to the normal world to bring back a gift to the community; the story of their journey and what they have learned.

The Hero's Journey is a wonderful and powerful motif for our life – there is something very reassuring to think that there is a pattern to what seems like very random events!    We all receive ‘calls to action’ throughout our lives and have to face our fears and overcome them.  The idea is that we try to learn to heed the calls earlier in the process when they are still just a ‘whisper’ rather than being knocked off our horse unceremoniously. As for me, I have finally heard the message and made the decision to thank the horse for a good ride as I swing my leg over the old nag and gently lower myself down to the ground (as gracefully as I can). To be continued...

PART TWO: Breaking in a new horse!