Riding and Managing With Focus

Yesterday I was working with Jenner as he was teaching one of the Mammoth Donkeys to drive. Jenner was doing spectacularly well. The donkey was doing great. I decided for us to go a route that I knew that the donkey did not like. It would take him away from the horse lot, but the horse lot would remain in his vision the entire time. This created an unbroken path of temptation to veer off course.

As we made a turn at a corner that took him directly away from the horse lot, the donkey balked. He wanted to turn off course. For the first time during this training session I was having significant difficulty keeping him on course. Nothing that I was doing was working. Then I did what one should always do in such situations. I turned the noise down, let the donkey pause for a moment, and I focused my eyes hard on a large pine tree in the direction in which I wanted to go. My eyes never came off of that tree. The donkey took a few missteps and then proceeded in a straight line towards the tree.

When I allowed his irritation and his confusion to cause me to loose focus he responded in a completely natural manner. He drifted, balked, and sought to turn back.

When  the demands of ordinary life cause me to loose focus on the growth and development of  our program the program will drift and turn back from its purpose. We all have demands of ordinary life that pull our attention away. Right now I am involved in the prosecution of a murder along with my normal case load of domestic violence, molestation and sexual assault. It is draining. The mind wears out before the body, but the body wears out much too soon.

It makes it harder to focus on what our program must be. We are not just a riding program or a breeding program. If so, I could never justify the effort that we put into what we do.

We are an educational institution.  We teach, and we learn, by word and by deed. Saturday some of the most important teaching deeds began. Our program was donated the tin from the top of two old barns and an out building, enough tin to save us a few thousand dollars over the next few years.

A wonderful crew of program participants and volunteers removed the tin. I helped for several hours and then went back to the horse lot to teach beginning riders. The crew worked hard to prevent this tin from being wasted.

The first micro lesson taught was that very hard work is a reward unto itself. The second micro lesson is that recycling is a duty that we owe to those who share our resources. The third micro lesson is that frugal use of our resources allows for program development and gives us an opportunity to reach more people. 

The fourth micro lesson is the hardest to teach and the hardest for modern young people to understand. Part, and one of the most important parts, of what we do as an educational institution is to teach in the atmosphere of a working agricultural operation. Working farms were used  and they looked very used.

And working farms reused everything that could be reused. Several years ago I was building a box to transport hogs. A friend of mine asked, only half jokingly, if I was going to buy new nails or pull old ones from broken boards, beat them out straight and then use them again.

New tin would be nice to have. It would be easier to handle. It would likely even work better--but it would teach nothing.

 New tin has no history. It has no story to tell.

Saturday was a big day for our program's future. We saved a fortune and we acquired, at no financial cost, a functional teaching resource.

And we must always seek to bring out the teachings that are in our resources.

That takes focus.