The Plastic Bag

We all live with fear, anxiety, and doubt. Today's contemplative story delves into how to change the ways in which we react to what bothers us, even when we cannot change or fix the thing itself. Is what's bothering you a bag or a bear? What are you going to do about it?

Transcript

Hello folks!

Today's contemplation is on fear and how we meet it.

They say you don't really know a person until you've seen them scared or angry,

And I'd wager that scared and angry are the same thing.

So this story is going to need a little bit of explaining to folks that,

You know,

Aren't horse people.

I was a horse trainer and then a therapeutic riding instructor for a long time,

And folks in the industry don't know this,

But the number one cause of fatalities in riding,

Not just injuries but actual straight up fatality,

Is,

Weirdly enough,

Plastic bags stuck in trees,

Power lines,

Blowing around,

Whatever.

Shopping bags.

Just ordinarily from the grocery store,

Nothing special.

And when you tell folks this,

Or they see a horse react the first time,

It's mystifying.

You know,

It's a thousand fifteen hundred pound animal that is scared out of its mind by like a two ounce shopping bag,

Whatever they weigh.

It's a little thing.

It's like the elephant and the mouse.

And it makes perfect sense to a horse because horses are prey animals,

And they see the world so differently than we do,

They react.

Everything wants to pull a horse down and eat it.

Everything.

So they look for predators everywhere,

And what really pushes a horse's buttons is sudden sound and sudden motion,

Or an object that they're unfamiliar with.

Guess what plastic bags do?

They check off all three of those boxes,

And even your calmest best horse,

If they haven't seen one yet,

Is going to lose their marbles the first time they see it.

So just because we don't understand immediately the psychology doesn't mean there's not valid stuff going on there.

Now,

A while ago,

I was competing in a challenge to retrain thoroughbreds right off the racetrack,

And my horse was named Charlie.

I still have Charlie,

I'm looking at him right now,

He's staring at me.

I was so excited to get this horse because everybody thinks that thoroughbreds are going to be crazy,

I mean they're race horses,

They go 40 miles an hour,

And they're just fire-breathing dragons.

And Charlie likes to nap,

And Charlie likes little children,

And Charlie likes kittens.

He's just so mellow,

He's the same horse standing still as he is a flat gallop.

He's mellow,

He's calm,

He's smart,

He's not afraid of anything.

They raced him all over North America,

So he can go to a new place and just hang out anywhere you take him.

He's lovely,

I was so excited to have Charlie.

And I thought,

He's not afraid of anything.

And he seemed to not be.

We walked through the scary pool noodles,

I put a scary crinkly tarp over him and walked around,

And scared the heck out of the board of horses,

But Charlie didn't care.

He wasn't even afraid of my wheelchair,

Which is a big ask for a horse.

So the first time Charlie saw a plastic bag,

I was not expecting what happened.

He wasn't either,

For that matter.

But he didn't run,

He didn't completely flip out,

Which a horse's best defense is to run,

And if they can't run,

Then they turn and fight it.

Or,

If they're smart like Charlie,

They freeze,

They look at it,

And they do this breath.

And we call it a hunk,

And it doesn't do it any justice.

It's like there is a living dragon next to you.

They take a deep breath in their nose and then blow it out,

And it is explosive.

It's right out their nose.

And you think something's on fire next to you.

It's almost magical.

Several cultures included,

Many Native cultures and the Badoo,

To them that is a sacred thing.

When a horse does that,

It's a challenge to the universe.

It's saying,

I am here,

Fight me,

Or go away.

Now,

I'm not Native,

I'm not Badoo,

I'm a horse trainer from the East Coast,

Living in 2021.

But that sound is magical when you hear it.

And it's not a bad sound.

It means that the horse is going to stand there and not run away,

And he's going to face this.

And they might trot around a little bit and get all prancy,

But it means that he is ready to face it.

You don't have to worry about catching a loose horse.

And so,

Later on,

Back in the barn,

I got the plastic bag,

And there's many ways to get horses used to scary objects.

The old-time ways are not very kind.

The way I do it is to turn it into a game.

Take the random object,

I hold it just where he can't see it,

And flap it around or whatever,

And they get curious.

They look at it.

They want to look at it from every angle and touch it with their nose.

They use their noses like we use our hands.

So Charlie goes and sniffs it and touches it,

And then he figured out that carrots come out of it.

And that was the end of that discussion.

He was fine after that.

And when you do that enough,

Something kind of changes in your horse.

They look at you differently.

They go,

You can make the scary thing into something great.

And when things get sideways,

They don't run.

They just go,

Okay,

Mom,

Okay,

Dad,

What are we doing?

So about a month later,

You know,

We were up in the woods,

And there's wildlife in the woods.

Go figure.

That's their home.

And we came up on a mama bear.

And now,

Bears aren't bad.

They're just bears.

There's a lot of native lore about bears,

And one of my favorite expressions in Penobscot is,

We all live with bears,

Implying there is something that will scare you,

And how you react to it says nothing about the scary object or person or thing or whatever.

It says nothing about what's scaring you.

How you react to that fear shows everything about you.

I love that saying.

So we all live with bears,

And that day,

Mama came out.

We were on our way back.

It was just Charlie and me.

We were on our way back,

And she comes out in the middle of the trail,

And we must have scared her because she stopped,

And her cubs were little.

And anybody that knows bears knows that mama bears are the most dangerous.

It's not because they mean to be.

It's because everything wants to hurt their cubs.

You can't really blame them.

But when you see a mama bear push her cubs under cover,

She pushed these little guys into some blackberries because they couldn't run with her.

They were too small.

When you see her do that and square up,

You get a lump in your throat.

That's fear.

And it's very real.

And if you run,

A bear is going to chase you.

If you run,

She's going to be on you.

And that's not her being me or bad.

That's her being a bear.

So Charlie did exactly what he did with the plastic bag.

He stopped,

Picked himself up.

His tail goes up in the air,

And he goes,

I'm here.

What are we doing?

He trusted me enough to not run away from a bear.

For a horse,

That's amazing.

He looked a predator right in the face,

And he goes,

I've got mom with me.

She's on my side.

We're a team.

Let's stand here and do this.

And the bear watched us for a minute.

She grunted a little bit,

Called her cubs out,

And they went on their way across the trail.

And Charlie and me walked back to the barn.

My legs were made of jello,

And I think his might have been too.

I don't know.

I can't ask him.

But we walked away.

There was no confrontation.

Sometimes in life,

We come up to plastic bags or bears or whatever it is that frightens us,

And we all have it.

And I'll ask you to think about what those are in your life,

And sort them into plastic bags,

Things that really can't hurt you,

But give you so much stress,

And just push all your buttons.

And bears,

Things that really need to be handled carefully,

Things that can harm you,

Things that are potentially dangerous or detrimental.

And I challenge you to react like my little horse.

I'm here.

Let's do this.

Learn not to run.

Learn to stand your ground and assess what's going on,

Why it's causing you fear,

And what you're going to do about it.

And you'll find that all of us have more bags than bears.

And we'll identify them.

They're the little thing that's doing your taxes,

Paying the bills,

Some snarky thing someone said to you.

Those are plastic bags.

And the trick in life is to get really good at dealing with those,

So that when we come up on a bear,

When we come up on something huge,

We can stand our ground.

We can stay calm.

And we can handle it.

Now,

I'm not saying breathe like a dragon at your in-laws.

That might get you some funny looks at the table.

But take the lesson a little more figuratively.

When somebody cuts you off in traffic or any of the little tiny things in life,

Even today,

Practice it for the next hour.

Just let things go that you identify as bags.

And when you get really good at that,

There's power.

There's strength.

And there's the courage not to run away.

In our culture,

We are always running.

We're just like a horse.

We're always running from one scary thing to another.

You turn on the news and it's panicking every day.

We're bombarded with all of this,

All the time,

And this is why people are so stressed out.

And it's not that people are bad,

It's not that people are unworthy or not doing something right.

This is how we're currently set.

Learning to let go of your plastic bags.

Well,

Hopefully recycle them.

But learning to let go of your plastic bags will help you in the long run,

And is the first step towards being able to stand still instead of run.

Thank you for listening.

Have a beautiful day.

Reviews

A good share about facing our fears and not running from them.

What a wonderful, metaphorical and powerful story! As a horse person, it was perfect. My horse once did the same thing as yours with a bear. Thank you for giving his brave response such beautiful meaning and turn it into a valuable life lesson!

Thank you for your story. You are right people nowadays have a habit to run away from difficulties.