Busy-Making vs Productivity

The system we lives in thrives on busy-ness, but not productivity. People everywhere are frantically working, and though to some degree, within the system we live in this is necessary: we have bills to be paid and obligations to attend to, much of it is a hellish loop we are pulled into and hardly realize we have the key to our own chains.

Our minds become so spun out from constant doing that even when we have a gap in our schedule, a free moment to breathe, we fill it in with projects. A constant need for changing, expanding, getting and doing more fills the void of silence with action and gain. This makes us look very productive, but busyness is, in fact, is the opposite of productivity.

When it comes to horses, if we train through "doing" and busyness, every second of a training session could be aspiring toward a goal, pushing toward something. But inevitably, this causes resistance in the horse, or produces an incoherent and disconnected system - one with no clear dots for the horse to connect. In this way, we actually take far more time teaching things that could have been set up far better and more fluidly, or as many of us do, constantly filling holes in the training we dug ourselves: fixing issues we created with a frantic need to "get it done."

This is especially apparent with a new student, and it can take a long time for them to settle into the pace. There are so many issues that need sorting: trailer loading, tying, canter leads, and didn't you hear me? I said he doesn't accept the bit! A new student can easily feel as if I either don't listen to them, or don't know what to do about the problem. I remember feeling that way with my teacher too, when it seemed like she answered the wrong question altogether. I'd ask, about trailer loading and she woul dgive me some response about balance.

Until one day, I realized all my problems had somehow solved themselves. the fix actually was balance: both physical and mental. They just came together as the horse found center.

It is extremely difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to get people out of the loop of busy-making, unproductive as it can be. It feels productive because it is rewarded, encouraged, and driven by every facet of the world around us.

But to become truly productive, we have to learn to accept the gap: to look into the void and accept its discomfort, and learn its lesson fully, without the frantic need to fill it.