Most people just don’t have the stomach for it; to dare to take a really big bite, I mean.
Me included.
I suppose there’re a million reasons why we shouldn’t take such chances.
Too old; too young; too smart; not smart enough; too many responsibilities; too big a leap; and the worst reason of all, there’s not enough money in it.
But when I think about this young cowboy, I think about someone who’s doing what he was meant to do—taking a huge bite; devil be damned.
And while the vast majority of us were not meant to ride rodeo stock, we do have our own wild horses to tame; feral beasts of one sort or another.
Now I know what I am writing here is the kind of thing most people roll their eyes over; it’s been said so often it becomes cliché. And I also know the older we get the supposedly smarter we get—certainly we can’t haphazardly jettison everything we’ve worked so hard on just to have a few thrills. I get that.
But with our feeble apologies already pinned to our clothes, we sit on the fence and hold fast to the familiar–never grabbing the reins of what it is we’d really love to do; what it is we were put on the planet to do. And that, it seems to me, is to die a little bit every day; to waste the precious moments we’ve been given—and such a reality is not just sad; it’s tragic; catastrophic by every measure.
The hardest part about the whole thing is that, at one point in our lives, I am convinced we had the capacity of this young cowboy—the fortitude; the self-assuredness; the backbone—to step out of our comfort zone and answer the call. Early on in our lives, I know each of us had just enough nerve to say, “The hell with what you might think, I don’t care if I get my ass kicked or if I look like the village idiot, this is what I have to do; this is what I must do.”
What in God’s name happened to us? How could we let such a magnificent virtue sneak out the backdoor unnoticed.
All this to say, it occurs to me watching this cowboy live out his dream, now is the time we should be using every ounce of wisdom and energy we have doing—or planning to do—what we were put on this earth to do. Each of us should be doing what’s written on our hearts. And if that’s not a possibility today, then we should be planning the great escape to do it in the near future; working tirelessly and relentlessly on the ultimate disappearing act; one that would make Harry Houdini look like a rank amateur.
To do anything but is to tinker with our destiny; to ignore what we were put here to do and to be and to become.
The things you can learn from cowboys.
Big bites, western NE
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