A Feather’s Weight More

Close up of Storm’s eye Photo by Kayleigh of Raw Photography

“He looks like a war horse!” my friend exclaimed to me in a text, after catching a look at Storm in the field playing with the babies. Mind you, he’s 21, no spring chicken anymore. But we’ve been quietly working two to three times a week, every week, for quite some time now.

Her comment made me proud. The work we’ve been doing is about as interesting as watching paint dry on the outside. It’s walking. Plain, mundane walking. But it’s like a duck in water, you can’t see how much paddling is going on underneath the surface. All of those hours of undetectable changes were beginning to reveal results.

“A feather’s-weight more, weighs a lot.” I had to read it a few times to understand what Katherine Morgan Schafler meant in her book, The Perfectionsist’s Guide to Losing Control. But once it sank in, the true weight of the statement hit me.

Life doesn’t happen in big radical changes. We love to tie all our hopes and dreams (and goals) up in the idea of radical change, but that’s a recipe for frustration, and ultimately disappointment.

Growth, change and healing aren’t big flashy things that suddenly appear in one fell swoop. Watching our pets grow is a great example. Day by day they change and develop until one day we blink and a mature cat, dog or horse is sitting in front of us.

Training, healing, “the work,” it’s all the same - it’s never a flashy fanfare. It often looks like teeny tiny baby steps, and often feels like slogging through mud the whole way.

Our dog quieting down after 5 barks instead of a dozen.

The cat contemplating clawing the furniture, then stopping and going to do something else.

The horse tensing at the loud noise from just out of sight, and then relaxing and going right back to work instead of spooking and escalating their behavior.

It’s one small step forward that is better than the last time.

Too often our expectations of our pets, and ourselves, are dramatic improvements in the situation immediately.

This sets us, and our pets, up for frustration and failure.

Success looks like all the little baby steps strung together until we blink one day and realize things are dramatically different.

How can you break things down in to baby step successes for your pet? Where might you be asking for too big of a change from your pet?