I guess I could describe the epiphany I had this morning as the crossroad between optimism and pessimism. Since that says hardly anything, I’ll elaborate!
Just to be clear, these are mere generalizations. Pessimists have an easy time lingering on the moments that weigh a person down and all-things-negative jump out at them. This is not necessarily always a bad thing if the person is merely observing and being honest about the negativity that happens to them. An optimist will put quite a bit of effort into ignoring the negative and trying to only focus on the positive, lovely things in life. Both of these life styles have their pros and cons and there are, of course, different kinds of optimists and pessimists of varying extremes.
What I was musing about this morning (playing with the mustang at 6 am at a quiet, foggy ranch) is, indeed, a crossroad. Thanks to Eclipse, my mustang “project”, I was reminded how important it is to be aware of and pay attention to the things that frustrate, confuse, or anger us. Face them and ponder why this thing, what ever it is, is having such an affect on you. But don’t act on it. That is, don’t let your frustration out, but see what it is that is causing it and deal with that.
Sometimes, working with animals can frustrate us. We might think: Jeeze, I’m making this just about as easy as possible to understand! He must be “disobeying” me on purpose.
No, no, no… This is where we should stop and say: Well, he’s obviously not understanding it, so I have to find a way to make it even more clear. Don’t let frustration out, even if you think you’ve made it as clear as possible what it is you want. Even if you’ve spent the entire morning working on it and they still haven’t got the slightest clue. Something’s obviously just not clicking. Sit down for a second and observe, without getting frustrated. Emotional control is the name of the game when it comes to animals. Even being able to admit or discover what it is that is frustrating us will take us huge leaps forward.
Here are a few updates on how my mustang project is doing!
Make the image full screen or, even better, go to the video’s Youtube page to view these videos!
Somehow, the subtitles aren’t fully visible if you don’t do that.