Those of you who have been reading my contributions here have read about the unexpected trials and tribulations that this year has thrown at me. As I continue to rack up life experience in the form of years lived, I am constantly reminded of how important it is to not only have a plan and goals but also to never get too attached to any particular plan or goal. The most valuable tool that I have learned in my restaurant has served me well in life and riding as well. It is the ability to be flexible and to think on my feet. When things go as planned, excellent! Consider yourself lucky and enjoy it!! When things go awry and all your best laid plans become impossible, don’t let it ruin you. Do your best to laugh it off and immediately start making your next plan.
This tactic served me well in business. The restaurant industry can be as volatile and as difficult to predict as the horse world. Something is always going wrong or breaking. This usually happens on a Friday night, the busiest night of the week and whatever problem there is almost always puts the night’s service in jeopardy. Staff get sick and call in ten minutes before opening. Walk-ins or hot water heaters break twenty minutes into a busy service when nobody has the time to stop and deal with the problem. Yet, the restaurant absolutely cannot function until said problem is resolved. What do you do? If you are like me, you mutter a terrible diatribe under your breath, breathe deeply and figure out how to bounce back. For those of you who have worked in a restaurant, I’m sure that you have lived through this type of scenario more than once. For those of you who haven’t experienced this way of life, I’m guessing you can see some parallels between these scenarios and similar unplanned mini catastrophes in the horse world.
For the past two years I have been trying to get my sensitive and accident prone Thoroughbred Oskar out to compete and have only managed to get to two events of the many more I had preliminarily listed on my competition calendar. I have been making a lot of progress and most recently, I have even acquired an exciting young horse to bring along to minimize the chance that the next year will again find me horseless. Just like clockwork, I fell off and busted my wrist. Ugh. It would be really easy to have a little pity party for myself and lament my bad luck. Don’t get me wrong, I have had moments of total collapse such as when I have to get Ed, my husband to put my hair up for me or when I can’t get my sweater over my cast. However, for the most part, I am struggling and striving to keep bouncing back, to keep making new plans and to try to remember to consider how lucky I am in general and how much worse my situation could be!
Winter is surely making its imminent arrival known here in central VT. It’s still dark and getting colder in the mornings when I drag Ed out to help me feed and turn out my herd before he leaves for work. This is the time of year to assess how far we have come and how far there is yet to go. Despite recent events, this has been a wildly eventful and exciting year for me. Twelve months ago I was still a restaurant owner rolling with the punches, averting disaster and keeping morale high despite adversity. My life now presents a totally different adversity, usually horse or donkey related.
Regardless of the issue I’m facing, it’s important to think about the bigger picture and not let minor setbacks get me down, no matter how painful!