This episode of the podcast features chapters 4 and 5 of Dancing the Tightrope. If you haven’t listened to the first 3 chapters, I suggest listening to those first. It will help make sense of what’s coming in these next few chapters.

When I listened back to Chapter 3, where I read the sidebar blog “Where’s My Choice Here?”, it was somewhat stunning to me that many of the threads that I pulled together for Dancing the Tightrope started well before the accident that lays the foundation for the book. I was already onto the themes of dealing with fear, adrenaline, pressure and uncertainty. In some ways, I had been bumping up against the glass ceiling of my beliefs; the pivotal fall from the horse offer me a way to shatter those beliefs if I chose to open myself up to seeing things in a new way.

What’s standing out for me in this process of creating an audio version of the book are the pivotal moments, where a seemingly innocuous choice created huge change. The small choice to go trail riding could have just as easily been the choice to give up horseback riding for good. The small choice to call Bruce could have just as easily been something I never got around to doing. 

The choice to go back for a second visit to Bruce was both a mystery and a big damn deal. In the world of the way I had done things up to this point, that second visit would not have happened. Yet it did -  in this new world I was discovering.

Chapter 4 talks about our second visit to Camden to understand what this somewhat strange approach to life, horses and learning to live in nature’s world was all about. Chapter 5 shows you where I began to use what I was learning – somewhat naively at the time. In fact, reading it back now sometimes feels like I’m reading someone else’s story.

In Chapter 5, I’m still deciding if I should ever get back on a horse – something that’s difficult to grasp, given that I’m riding all the time these days. Think about a decision you’ve made that now seems so obvious – or a decision you are grappling with that may someday become obvious. Maybe these chapters will help you sort through the risks and rewards with an improving mindset.