Having an emotional investment into someone these days may seem like a burden to some. I have thought of it as being a burden many times.
As I have gotten older, I realize that everything that was ever once bad in your life, is meant to bring you to something better if one chooses to look at it as such.
Piggy backing off of yesterday's blog about finding peace of mind, one must be able to learn from their mistakes.
We all know how the old saying goes, "time heals everything", which is true because once you have had it out with someone you had an emotional connection to, it takes time for the emotions and feelings to wear off so that you can actually sit and think about what you needed to learn from that person.
I believe self-awareness and self-accountability can help speed up the process, and allow you to accept things much quicker if you are able to look at things at face value.
Of course, I relate everything to horses and the battle humans face between logic and emotion is the same thing when it comes to training horses - horses have a thinking side and a reactive side of their brain.
When humans get emotionally involved with someone, most of the time it is their emotional side that does the "thinking" for them - these emotions and feelings are reactionary responses.
The ability to feel emotions as humans is what makes us human - it is a primitive response and is something that is encoded into our DNA. Everyone has heard of the term "fight or flight response" and that is exactly what feelings are - a reactionary response to something that wards as a threat.
If our early ancestors thought too long about things, we ended up as food for other predators in the wild. Our fight or flight response is something that has allowed us to survive up to this point in time.
We live in a different world then we did 2 million years ago. Now, we have rules and social constructs we have to abide by. We have arts, music, and even social media that captivates peoples emotions in real time and shapes the way people think and feel.
While we do live in a different world, most people still operate in the world with the primitive side of their brain - they still react to their surroundings as if we were still predators in the wild.
Being as that we live in a world that is governed by other people, one must change the way they operate within the world by thinking more and reacting less.
Thinking about something takes work and expends brain calories, whereas reacting to things is the path of least resistance. Being able to identify and analyze a situation to come up with your own conclusion is something that takes time, energy, and effort.
Our ability to analyze situations and predict a possible outcome was the next step in our evolutionary ladder. Our ability to strategize our way to survival, whether it was trapping predators, or building a fire and shelter is what made the difference between us and every other living species on the planet.
With horses, everything is black and white - they have a thinking side of their brain and they have the reactive side of their brain. The reactive side of their brain is what mother nature programmed them with for survival - run first, and investigate later. Getting a horse to use the thinking side of their brain is exactly what has made them such good companions for humans for so long.
Getting inside the mind of a horse is a genuinely humbling experience. You watch them go from a reactive prey animal, to a confident partner with the willingness to work with you in real time.
God gave us our brains to be able to use them for good, for the benefit of others so that we can live out our lives to their fullest potential.
While this blog might not be the typical masculine/feminine role content I usually write about, I believe this mental framework is something that anyone could benefit from.
It is time to stop playing the victim, start analyzing, and take massive action to become a positive force for others, and for yourself.