🔆 Risk Aversion and Yearning

Taking Root: Two things can be true at once

Taking Root is my weekly gathering place for thoughts, events, wonders, and insights that happen in my life, in my mind, and around my farm. Free subscribers are cherished and you’ll receive this newsletter in your inbox each week. If you’d like to support my work further and gain access to my creative nonfiction and poetry while joining the conversation with monthly meet-ups and coaching events, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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When Everything Feels Dangerous

In matters of human safety, I have a privileged front-row seat in the horse industry. I don’t just watch trends happening, I live them — and when it comes to danger, safety, and risk tolerance, I have the scars to prove it.

For many of us who have made a life with horses, those scars are a badge of honor, some unspoken, subconscious code that is used to validate our knowledge, or a fallback when we don’t know the answers.

That’s not a healthy way to live.

But neither is a life that is so sanitized, so risk-avoidant, so incapable of taking chances that we don’t allow ourselves to live fully.

Most of my clients and fellow staff members at the farm would classify themselves as generally anxious. (I haven’t taken a poll yet, but my favorite pastime is impromptu, spontaneous verbal polling at all hours of the day where I question someone and then stare at them piercingly until they give me an answer. I don’t know if this method supports factual responses, but I enjoy doing it.) That we would classify ourselves as anxious is weird considering most of the people around me have willingly signed up to work with massive, unpredictable animals.

I consider myself generally anxious. And yet, here I am, every day speaking a broken language to a non-verbal creature of a different species and hoping we can come to some agreement that keeps me and the horse safe.

In the past decade, I’ve noticed a trend of increasingly policed chance-taking in all its iterations. Parents bring kids to riding lessons and want to see their children excel and gain skills in an upward trending graph line that can be charted and proven (kind of like testing in schools — a public benchmark of success). They want their children to ride faster. They want their children to jump horses over obstacles. However, they do not want their children to be hurt in the process. They do not want their children to fall off the horse in the course of learning.

I’ve fully taken advantage of the trend toward risk-aversion to do what the riding industry should have been all along: focusing on groundwork, slowing everything down, learning to notice the horse’s feedback. We edited the good stuff out of horse training during the 20th century and today’s reticent pace is an excellent opportunity to re-introduce ancient equestrian philosophy that once traveled to us contradictorily through the timeline of cavalries and horse-powered warfare. If your conquest relied on the maneuvers of a group of horsemen, it paid to have them competent, present, and reading the environment.

But I spend a lot of my time arguing in support of a slower pace to parents of riders who want to see their children steadily gain equine excellence — while simultaneously never experiencing injury.

But in today’s world of warning labels, higher insurance premiums, and a populace paralyzed by safety requirements, are we actually doing ourselves a favor by keeping ourselves safe at all costs?

Our increasing reliance on the online world has brought about a lot of this change, while also introducing new dangers. When our perception of the world is curated and edited through images and ideas crafted to reveal a flawless existence we begin to think that we’re doing it wrong when we’re met with challenges.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.

- Jack Gilbert — who also wrote one my favorite lines about writing, “It’s not a business with me . . . . I’m not a professional of poetry, I’m a farmer of poetry.”

Risk vs. Reward . . .

. . .is a term that is used often in market trading.

Even though my favorite pastime is digging in the dirt (or possibly because of this), my grandfather raised me to be a savvy and risk-considering investor. I’m a financial educator now and nothing makes me happier than sharing my experience with coaching clients and helping them consider their relationship to money, many for the very first time.

I was telling my apprentice group about how my farm has weathered so many downturns in the market — the dot.com crash (during which I had many IPO’s when IPO’s were cool and, damn, I took a beating), the 2008 financial crisis (I had a hunch something was really changing when all my clients with Porsche Cayennes traded their rides for Fords) the COVID-19 crash (no explanation needed) and — whatever it is that we’re experiencing right now. The tide is drawing back in after the post-pandemic flood and I’m feeling the change in my farm’s bottom line.

When I first started investing as a teenager, the financial minds around me constantly said — if someone had sold all their stock to keep from losing more during the crash that preceded The Great Depression on Black Friday in 1929, if they had sold instead of riding the waves of their losses, they would have lost more overall rather than taking the hit and waiting for the upturn.

People who stayed in the market came out ahead.

I feel the same about life.

Admittedly, I’ve never researched the market crash story to see if it is factual. It might have just been a marketing ploy in praise of long-term investing. That’s fine too.

In our current climate of fear (some actual, many existential and ephemeral like a challenging and mouthy ghost riding shotgun) we are bombarded with a continual sense of doom. The world is filled with people capitalizing on our fears. Fear makes great money. And it also is an excellent means of control. You have a lot of power over a populace that is afraid of losing everything they’ve gained.

What if the greatest revolutionary act we can do in this life is to consider our relationship with fear, to really look at it, to question what is coming from within us and what is coming from without us?

We don’t have to be courageous or bold or certain or even right. We can be wrong and still accomplish a great number of things.

I’ve found that my inner judgment, the critical voice that keeps me always second-guessing, is my mouthy ghost. He’s like that relative who always bashes your creative ideas because they’re terrified of risking and failing with their own.

We spend so much energy defending and projecting when that energy bloom could just as easily be prompting us to act.

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Risking Love

When I first began a romantic relationship with Christopher — someone I’d known all my life — I thought I was having a heart attack. There will be more on that later when life slows down and I finish writing from prompts I started four weeks ago. If I had paid attention to my body’s warning signs I would have missed an opportunity for the healthiest romantic partnership of my life.

Somewhere along the way, I started viewing normalized, habitual patterns as safety. If it was familiar, it was safe. But many of my patterns, which were created to keep myself safe at some point, most likely before I could verbally express them — were caught in an endless feedback loop, like Sisyphus and the boulder. The outcomes were not always beneficial to me though my guiding force was all about keeping myself safe.

Through cycles of personal safety I developed from a young age, I had learned to decipher different as bad — even when different, as in the case of Christopher — was in reality very, very good.

I’m so glad that with Christopher I allowed myself to be afraid and still connect with him anyway.

We can be scared and still show up, one tiny step at a time.

And that’s freaking powerful. I preach it every day at the farm.

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I watched the cat this morning. He made his rounds through the new plantings in the garden and allowed his curiosity to guide him. Mr. Dots is fourteen years old and when he first came to the farm as a kitten I was convinced he wouldn’t last long. He was white and possibly deaf, he’d had a rough start and we were surrounded by coyotes and owls and hawks. I tried to pawn him off on people’s mothers, one in particular whose lap he could sit in as they watched foreign movies together in the relative safety of a living room.

I didn’t have any takers, but I wasn’t very serious with the requests. Something told me he should stay.

And stay he has, keeping the feed room relatively rodent free while following his curiosity in the proud, swaggering way of neutered, male cats. I watch him making the rounds of the farm as I teach.

His life has been dangerous, uncertain, filled with experiences, and rich.

So many of our sayings about cats — curiosity of a cat — the cat has nine lives — cool cat — scaredy cat — point to experience and exploration. When we keep our cats indoors, it’s a struggle to keep them from slipping out of the cracks. We can’t contain them and really don’t want to.

Cats are an uncontainable force of nature.

So are we.

Mr Dots in the snapdragons — he’s ridiculously photogenic

My challenge for us all this week is to think about the rules we’ve placed on our lives, the safeguards we’ve erected to keep ourselves safe.

Have they really worked?

Have feelings of excitement and danger become intertwined so tightly that we can no longer tell which is which? I know they frequently do for me, and this keeps me from having a true read when my gut is screaming NO and has kept me from experiences that I mislabeled as a threat when the burst of energy was conversely trying to propel me into action.

Our resistance to change and risk-taking flies out the window when we’re presented with an actual problem. In crisis, we’re designed to act, and most of us do this subconsciously when something bad happens — and are later amazed at what we were able to accomplish. We arrive pre-programmed with an immense amount of wisdom.

We’ve all heard stories of people doing amazing things in bad situations: lifting cars, scaling mountains, finding a way out and through all manner of difficulties.

What I’m positing today is — that code is with us every moment. It doesn’t just appear in treacherous times and situations, though we’re living in a scary world and scary times.

Talk to me about your relationship with fear. Tell me your stories.

Love,
Kim

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I love me some Stoic philosophy:

It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.
-Seneca

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I’ll be posting the first chapter of Theotokos for all my paid subscribers this weekend. If you’ve been considering supporting my work in a greater way, now is a good time to leap into the deep end.

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Reflections on and antidotes to risk aversion from my readings this week:

• Andrea Gibson
  : Lessons from my First Surf Lesson

• Freya India
  : Risk Aversion is Killing Romance

• The Hidden Danger of Being Risk Averse: Harvard Business Review

• Understand Risk Aversion Through Utility Theory: Ashwin Rao

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May’s in-person Journaling Workshop was approved by the cat and cozily contained on the farmhouse porch. The company was exceptional.

Here are some of my events on the horizon:

• June 5th: Teen Journaling Workshop, in person at Bramblewood Stables 6-8PM

• June 7: Stable Roots Paid Subscriber Community Zoom 6PM EST

• June 17: Stable Roots Apprentice Group Zoom 6:30 PM

• June 18-21: Kids’ Connection Camp at Bramblewood Stables

• June 20: Adult Saddle Club, in-person at Bramblewood Stables 6PM

• June 28: Journaling Workshop in-person at Bramblewood Stables 6-8 PM

• June 30: Virtual Journaling Workshop via Zoom 1-3 PM EST

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