Horsemanship for Health

Over a decade ago I started a community philosophy group. A group of people interested in philosophical enquiry met once a week for six or seven years. We talked about happiness, about power and greed, about truth, about kinship, about friendship. We discussed these ideas earnestly as if they were life and death matters. Some of the topics challenged us to overcome assumptions and biases and just plain stubbornness. We all got along. No one stopped speaking to each other. We laughed as much as we argued.

I miss those weekly discussions. I miss the friends I made during those intense evenings. Every now and then, I am tempted to start another community group and then I remember that to truly understand philosophy, you have to put some of its ideas into practice. For philosophy to come alive beyond the seminar room, it has to encounter the sticky terrain of real life.

By chance this week I met a student from those early days and as we caught up on news, he reminded me that a decade had passed since I launched those community classes. He wanted to know what lessons I had learned in a decade – what wisdom could I offer from this stretch of time?

I fumbled as tried to wrap my mind around ten years. Did anything leap out? Only how incredibly packed those years had been. Only my astonishment at having to confront a span of time and try to condense it into coherent lessons.

Life is teaching us something every moment. To reach back over the decade and try to extrapolate something useful and pithy to share for the benefit of others is beyond my scope. I know only that I learned some lessons that have brought me closer to understanding my role as a teacher of philosophy as a facilitator of wonder and curiosity at the world itself. Not to provide the answers, but to stimulate the questions.

If just one of my philosophy students got to considering life’s huge questions without expecting answers, that would open up the world to them and all who connected with them. That would be a lesson worth learning.

Because my student asked, though, I have given the question some thought. What has been important in my philosophical journey is the shift of emphasis from ‘why’ to ‘how.’ In the early days of learning I wanted to know why we existed at all and why certain situations turned out the way they did – why did some people struggle so much and others seem to glide through life relatively easily? Why are relationships so testing when we need other people so much? Why is the world lurching from crisis to crisis when we are more educated than ever before? Why are we not learning the lessons we need to learn about to living alongside those with whom we disagree?

The question for me now is not why, but how. I know from deep personal experience how easy it is to fall into why questions about the sudden and seemingly cruel nature of loss. At this point in my life, asking how I can live with heartbreak and still find joy is the ultimate question, indeed the only question I wish to explore.

There are many ways to live with how. I will leave you with three questions which may never get asked in a traditional philosophy seminar, and which are most pressing right now:

How do I get up and feel the pulse of life when it is dark?

How do I navigate my way through a day filled with minor irritations without adding my own?

How do I find connection, community and companionship in true heart bonds?

How do I live more attuned to my senses like the fox I saw most evenings as summer sank into autumn?

This past week I have stayed on the North Cornish coast where the Atlantic Ocean carves valleys into mountains of dark grey rock, creating a landscape both shifting and solid.

Time away has pulled me into a different rhythm. Slower (I took my laptop which stayed closed all week) and simpler. Early mornings with only one task to complete – boots on over pyjamas and a walk up the lane with the dogs – feeling the mist, the cool of autumn beginning, scenting, sensing, finding my way through torchlight. I wanted to embed this space in my memory for when life becomes cluttered and full again.

I rarely take time out. Like many social entrepreneurs, my work is my life. In the past eight years, I have been away only a handful of times. It is ironic that I can host retreats, time out for others, and not make room for replenishment myself. This week away has been the easiest of weeks because I have not fretted too much about all that I have left undone. In the days leading up to going away, I made arrangements for horse care- thank you to our wonderful volunteer Emma – and settled a few things that were important. As best I could, I cleared the way for time off.

Each day away became a container I could fill with activity – reading, writing, walking, cooking, cleaning and good conversation. Each day felt precious. My sister and I have been away a few times and each time we find our flow and it is nourishing and freeing and beautiful to spend time together. We both lead crazily full lives and taking a week out feels important and vital.

Writer and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes about spending a week with her sister in a simple beach shack. In Gift from the Sea, her book of luminous essays, she reflects on time and what makes each day so perfect. As it is with our week, the two women set a pattern of freedom, of not being cramped in space or time or limited in activity. The sisters do not lie on the beach doing nothing – their days have a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. The rhythm is easy and unforced.

“Work is not deformed by pressure. Relationship is not strangled by claims…we have moved through our day like dancers, not needing to touch more than lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm.”

Thrown back into the hurly burly of our lives, it is difficult to detect the underlying pattern, and find our natural rhythm. So many of our systems and organisations work against our nature and we lose our balance. Exhausted and depleted, we take time off to recover only to return again and again to the same old cycles. Sometimes, and this has been true of my life, we cannot take the extended rest that would reset our balance, we have to work with where we are.

Anne Morrow asks questions about the intermittent nature of our being. “How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one’s existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?”

Watching the sea withdraw and return brings her to understand that ‘each cycle of the tide is valid, each cycle of the wave is valid, each cycle of a relationship is valid.’

Coming home the undone work sits on my desk, still, and I am not dismayed. I see that it is part of the pattern. Inspired and refreshed, I find I am moving in a new rhythm, carrying with me the image of the Atlantic rolling and falling, wave after wave, splitting and reforming, endlessly moving.