The sky was getting darker by the second, almost an inky black in some spots. The storm was coming and I was alone, frantically driving to the stable where ten of my horses were outside in their paddocks with no shelter and nowhere to hide.
It was going to be a bad one.
In Alberta, thunderstorms come and go all through the long summer days. They can be ferocious in their power and can’t be taken for granted. Tornadoes could touch down at any time during one of these powerful storms.
I unlocked the gate to the long driveway and checked the sky. Trying to gauge how much time I had before it hit, I realized that I didn’t have enough. The winds whipped around me and the first raindrops began to fall.
I didn’t want to leave the horses outside. They would be frightened and it wasn’t their fault that I wasn’t there sooner. I would do what I could to get them inside to safety.
By the time I drove up to the barn, the skies had opened. Thunder began to crackle around me and the lightning flashed menacingly. It wasn’t even safe to be where I was but I didn’t care. The horses meant more to me than worrying about the consequences of a lightning strike. Not smart, I know, but when you have animals you understand.
I started to bring them in. Why was I always alone when things like this happened?
One by one I brought them into the barn, the rain falling in torrential sheets, unrelenting and unforgiving. I shouted at the sky, “Why don’t you just rain harder?”
It answered me by raining even harder.
Somehow we all survived that day, but honestly it could have ended up much differently. None of what happened was under my control. The horses could have spooked as I brought them in and run me over, but they didn’t. We could have been hit by lightning, but that didn’t happen either.
Other than being completely soaked, drained of energy, upset and relieved at the same time, there was no damage done to me.
Except in my mind, there was. The experience was deeply imprinted and I never wanted to feel that level of fear again.
Life is never predictable. We don’t know what is around the next corner, what could happen that is beyond our control that might put us into a dangerous predicament in a heartbeat. The lack of control over our environment leads us to try to make things more secure so they can’t hurt us.
We save money for a rainy day, and for the day when we won’t be able or want to work anymore. We pay insurance so if something bad happens we will be compensated in some way.
Sometimes we don’t attempt to do anything new because we don’t want to fail, or have to deal with the unknown because it’s scary. The familiar and the safe is more comfortable.
The day of the storm, after the horses were settled in and I was dry and not shaking anymore, I decided a few things.
First, I didn’t want to always have to do things by myself. I always thought I could, but I realized I didn’t want to. I also didn’t want to be alone on a farm anymore.
Mostly, I didn’t want to take care of horses for a living. I had done it for years but my passion for it was gone.
These were all life-changing decisions I made that day, and within a year I was gone from the farm and several years later out of the horse business. That took time but the wheels were set in motion that day.
Sometimes more clarity is gained by finding out what we don’t want in life and moving away from that instead of trying to figure out what we think we want.