Have you faced disappointment in your life? Of course you have, it’s the one thing that every single person on this planet has experienced at one point or another, a very common denominator.
Disappointment can be as small as the coffee shop being out of your favourite flavouring or it can be as soul crushing as your lifelong dreams being over before they’d really begun. Disappointment can hit when we least expect it and it doesn’t care if you are a good person, how much you have prepared and practiced, how many good deeds you have under your belt or your absolute need to succeed.
I have had many disappointing times in my life, one that haunts me is where I’ve created riding goals – schedules, training, blood sweat and tears poured into my horses, aiming to achieve everything I’ve wanted for 30 years and then I send in the entries – only to have my body let me down. Twice! This year it happened again and I find myself in a bit of a groundhog day where I appear to be repeating 2018 all over again, the difference being that while I am again bitterly disappointed; I am using my past experience to listen to my body. The last time I really pushed myself past safe limits and ended up in hospital. This time, I will keep going softly, with a little hacking and gentle riding trying to take each day as it comes.
As most of you know, horses make life supremely wonderful, but they also make it a disappointment minefield, and no-one escapes unscathed. I don’t mean losing out on the ribbon because of an unlucky pole but more the every-day, field injuries, missing shoes, vet bills, box rest and hundreds of myriad problems they cause themselves in a bid to keep you grounded.
It’s how we deal with disappointment that makes us as a person, the ability to face it head on, acknowledge it and feel the sting helps set you up to face another day and to find that strength to keep going, to try again.
Suffering any kind of disappointment doesn’t mean you have to give up, instead you can learn to use it as an opportunity. The coffee shop doesn’t have salted caramel for your coffee? Try a new flavour, how about hazelnut! Can’t get out and compete your horse show-jumping? Try endurance riding, try Trec or maybe Dressage. That show you wanted to enter but your horse went lame? You can still go -support your friends who are competing and live vicariously through them. Your support may be the difference in their performance.
Your time to shine will come, every disappointment can open a door of opportunity for you to find new things to enjoy, and who knows it might even lead to you taking a path you never considered.
When you are old and you look back on your life, you may be amazed at the twists and turns your life took because you turned your disappointing times into these opportunities to experience something new!