I’m reminded every so often of a conversation I had with a friend of mine over 30 years ago. The memory is usually triggered by some random comment or event, but it’s one of those memories that seems to always linger near the surface of my thoughts. It resides on a shelf behind a clear window, not a door that needs to be consciously opened. So, naturally, if I happen to walk by the window, I’ll take a look at the familiar memory.
This particular friend was pretty handy with a rope and could put a nice handle on any horse with a half-decent mind. He was more of a tactician than a masterful artist, but I respected his considerable abilities and consequently gleaned a lot of insight from his opinions, many of which he freely and frequently offered.
My friend was several years my senior – not so many years as to be considered of a different generation but far enough removed that, at the time, I didn’t quite consider myself to be his peer. We had many conversations over a period of several years about, but not limited to, cows and horses and rodeo and religion and farriers and kids and dogs and business and life and death and responsibility and perspective. The way I remember it, I mostly just listened. Over time, I learned to sift through the superfluous excess of the conversations and secure for future reference the useful nuggets that might be identified as wisdom.
The conversation of which I’m often reminded really gave no hint of its eventual value to me at the time it transpired. It was more in the casual, kind of funny category. My friend told of a time when he, in his early 20s, was invited to a branding at one of the big outfits in his home country. He eagerly loaded up his horse, threw a couple of ropes in the back of the pickup and made his way through the high desert country to the location of the branding. Before he unloaded his horse, he made his way to where the cattle were rodeared. He watched for a few minutes as several handy buckaroos were calmly flipping houlihans, backhands, sidearms and every other kind of loop he could imagine, each one of them true to its mark. Facing certain embarrassment and realizing that his arm and talents with the nylon hoop were clearly overmatched by the wizardry of the masters with their 50-foot rawhide riatas, my friend didn’t even unload his horse. He volunteered for groundwork and stayed there until the last calf was dragged to the fire. That day at the branding proved to be a motivator for him in much of what he did and accomplished later in his life. I never knew him as someone who was afraid to jump in the deep end, even with the prospect of failure screaming at him, but he tried to have his homework done before he took the plunge. Even so, he failed as often as he succeeded, but he never stopped trying.
I thought of my friend’s experience at the buckaroo branding not long ago as I visited with my grown daughter, a mother of two young kids of her own. Over the past few years, I’ve marveled at how she’s met and overcome some immense life challenges that threatened to crush her indomitable yet vulnerable spirit. Like many mothers, more than anything, she wants to do right by her babies, and she probably worries too much about the very real possibility that she’ll lose a few battles. Even so, she did her daddy proud when she told me of a flash of inspiration she’d experienced a couple of years ago as she watched her fearless 3-year-old daughter struggle and fail, time and again, as she tried to cross the monkey bars by herself.
Her first inclination was to tell her feisty little one that if she kept trying, she’d conquer the task in no time. As she was about to offer those very words of encouragement, something stopped her, and she chose a different answer. She realized it may very well be that despite her little one's ferocious determination, her best efforts might still be met only with failure, even though her friends might master the skill with far less effort in a few minutes. Instead, the motherly wisdom she offered was this: “If you keep trying, good things will happen.”
I was struck by the savvy of my once-little girl who, as a notoriously stubborn and determined child herself, had seemingly fought me at every turn. It’s exceptional enlightenment to understand and accept that no matter how hard you work at something, you may or may not accomplish what you hoped to achieve. The true gift of tenacity and grit is to embrace effort’s rewards, even and especially if those rewards are not the prize you might have envisioned.
