Is riding a horse easier than social networking?
Short answer: yes.
And no.
Riding a horse requires balance, patience and the reconciliation of emotion. (Also a saddle, bridle and at least one lesson). It’s often absolutely crucial that you act in a way that is absolutely the opposite of the way you want to act. If your horse gets scared (by a flapping tarp, say – or a huge horse-eating crow) and bolts, it’s most effective to be calm and centered; to breathe deeply, send your energy downward, and sit deep in the saddle. But there’s something about having the 1000-lb animal that you’re sitting on suddenly stop, whirl and run in the opposite direction that tends to make most humans want to scream, lean forward, grab onto neck or mane and hold on with our legs as tightly as possible. All of which — hello — only makes the horse run faster.
Social networking, on the other hand, requires: oh, right — balance, patience and the reconciliation of emotions.
One must be balanced, because publishing one’s own eccentric viewpoints about, say, politics or religion, on-line for (hopefully) thousands of other people to see might possibly not be the very best idea – for a business – where the idea is to appeal to a broad base. Then again, publishing bland, “correct” stuff: where’s the fun in that?
One must be patient – with oneself, mostly – because all this social networking stuff is obviously designed for a demographic that one grew out of about 4 decades ago. (?!) The middle-aged brain was not what Facebook had in mind when designing the toolbar.
As for acting in a counter-intuitive fashion? Let’s just say that the introvert who is better with animals than people might not be the best at blatantly asking everyone they know to “like” them.
So, yeah — riding a horse is easier. Then again, flubbing up the social networking thing will only result in humiliation, shame and the loss of potential business (ahem – income). While flubbing up the horse-riding thing might easily end in a broken collar bone – which would make it really hard to type — which would make the networking much harder, which would result in the loss of potential business, er, income.
Guess we’ll stick with the original, 3-tier plan for Success in All Things. Hang out with horses (dogs, cats, alpacas,chickens, sheep, goats, llamas…) in the morning, network socially in the afternoon, and occasionally disappear entirely from human contact and social discourse, in order to reclaim the capacities for patience, balance and reconciliation…