You Can Lead a Horse to Water

Or, How to Answer the Call From the Universe

About a week ago I got a spontaneous call from my friend Raff, who in many ways could also be my brother. It’s fair to say he’s one of my favorite humans. He was in the city just for a few days, and right now he was at a playground in the neighborhood with his son Dion, and would I like to join them for a little while? WOULD I!? I couldn’t put my shoes on fast enough.

Before that phone call, it had been a slow and lethargic day. I woke up at 11, made some breakfast and coffee, got lost in the internet for a while, took a nap despite not really being tired. Maybe it was the heat from last week’s heat wave, but I couldn’t seem to find motivation to do anything. I was so thankful for the phone call, which also felt like a call from the universe, to get off the couch.

It makes me wonder, when I’m stuck in that kind of rut, how I can unstick myself. What would I have done that day if not for that call? How can I offer the motivating phone call to myself, and not rely on an external change in circumstance?

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

I am the horse. How many times have I been lead to water and refused to drink? How many teachers, mentors, friends—to say nothing of my parents—have tried to show me a path or expose me to something or offer an insight that I was too proud or selfish or stubborn to receive? How many opportunities have I run away from because they were a little challenging or uncomfortable, because they required me to wake up early, because the task at hand was unfamiliar or awkward or I wasn’t good at it yet? How much of life have I wasted simply by refusing to drink the water that someone offered me?

I don’t mean to sound all doom-and-gloom about this. I’m living a great life, happy with where I am and what I have, and generally optimistic and proactive about the future. It’s just that as I begin to notice (as I said to a friend over coffee last week) that I finally have a brain, I begin to wonder where my brain has been all this time. For reasons I can’t explain, things that seem perfectly obvious or clear or important to me now just—weren’t, before. Why not? Where was I? What’s changed? It’s as if I’m finally seeing all these lovely bowls of water all around me, and feeling thirsty enough to dip my nose into them, and simultaneously scratching my head wondering, “Why haven’t I been drinking this whole time?”

Beyond the worn truth that we never properly appreciate our parents or our childhoods, the question becomes: what are ways I can bring myself to water? Of course it’s no one’s responsibility to make me drink anything—and I wouldn’t want them to! Ack! I’m resistant already just to being lead!—so how can I take the reins (if you’ll pardon the extension of the metaphor), and take responsibility not only for drinking but also for finding water and leading myself to it in the first place?

I think of ways I have tried to lead myself to water, coaxing myself to be the best I can be: experimenting with new ways to structure my time to encourage more reading and writing and less social media; resolving to leave the apartment and see sunlight at least once a day; getting over (or at least ignoring) my fear of rejection and reaching out to old friends (or people I want to make friends with); all the games I play with myself and goals I set and reset for myself in order to get that stubborn horse—me—closer to what I know I want in the first place.

And still the old nag wakes up in the morning and refuses to drink the water, until a call from Raff breaks the pattern, and the complaining old mule is replaced by the eager puppy at the playground.