If the nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud

Once upon a time, there was a boy who liked horses.  He learned to ride them and to groom them, to feed them, care for them, and even how to catch them when they had been set loose in the field for a time.  He respected them, and although they were much larger and more powerful beasts, they also respected him, and they taught him their secret ways and the boy and the horses were happy together.

In that country, they had riding competitions where young people would compete in various skills that involved horses–riding, roping, hitting targets while moving on horseback, and guiding horses through challenging courses.  Once, in one of these rodeos, another rider for some unknown reason lost control of her horse, something that can be relatively easy to do, especially when the rider is young.  Her horse panicked and plowed into the neighboring horses, spooking them and their riders.  The shoulder of her horse caught the boy under his right leg, hard enough to knock his foot from the stirrup, and the impact drove his leg up and over the saddle so that the boy lost his mount.

Down he went, fleetingly hoping that a horse would not kick him or trample him as he fell into their midst.  They did not, however.  Instinctively, whether through mutual respect or some divine providence, the horses moved away as the boy fell face first into the dust.  He felt his left knee connect sharply with a hard object, but other than that and the temporary loss of his wind, the boy was unhurt.

The rodeo proceedings stopped and the announcer fell silent.  The other riders milled about on their mounts as one of the officials came into the ring to see whether or not the boy had been injured, but the boy was already standing as the official arrived, favoring his left leg a bit.  The official asked if the boy was okay and the boy nodded, looking for his horse, which stood only a little ways off, looking quizzically back at the boy.  The boy went to the horse and winced as he bent his left knee to swing back up into the saddle.

The official came to him and said, “I’ve not seen that.  I’ve not seen a youngster thrown from a horse who was willing to just get back on like that.”

The boy answered simply, “It wasn’t the horse’s fault.  There’s no reason I should be afraid of him.”

The rodeo continued from that point, and although the boy’s knee later swelled painfully, things settled back into their routine.  The knee healed, but continued to remind the boy of the incident through painful predictions of rain for the rest of his life.

The point is that it is easy to blame the horse, and we often do.  In life, however, it is almost never the horse’s fault.  Not that there can’t be extenuating circumstances, black swan events, revolutions, disasters, and all the parts of life that we imagine might dramatically impact our own.   And it might be that a politician (or several, or many of them)  might promote the agenda of widespread wage slavery, for example, by systematically undermining education while holding up a given country as a shining example of individual economic opportunity.   That it can be up to us to plan for such eventualities makes life challenging, for such events or current can be difficult to discern in the subtly moving current of our days.

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. (Julius Caesar, 4.3.224-30)

Interesting that the speaker here is Brutus, in his self described process of riding at the top of his fortunes, in which he foresees a precipitous impending decline.  Brutus seems a good man who makes bad choices, and throws in with bad associates with other agendas.

Yet, Winston Churchill also closed a staff memo with this quotation in 1943, and history has come to see Churchill as having caught (or perhaps created) his own rising tide.

Similarly, Hamlet, telling Horatio how, on his journey to England, he could not sleep, but that the very lack of sleep fated him to discover his uncle’s plot to have him killed: