Don’t delay the inevitable.

At our house, we all eat dinner together and afterwards we my husband and I have very specific duties. I clean the kitchen while my husband gives our son a bath. After the bath, I spend a little time cuddling and talking with our son before I put him to bed, while my husband completes any cleanup I didn’t get to. 

On Saturday night, as I looked at the daunting pile of dishes, which I had already washed three times earlier in the day, I tried to put it off. I stood in the kitchen and scrolled Instagram, poured (and drank) a glass of wine, and sent a few text messages. While I did this, the kitchen mess loomed in the back of my mind and literally all around me. I didn’t enjoy the time I spent procrastinating. I was delaying the inevitable, while being somewhat miserable because I knew the cleanup would still have to be done. 

What we can learn from cows and buffalo

Every time I have a daunting task, I think of a story I heard from speaker and author, Rory Vaden. Rory’s story goes like this: 

Rory grew up in Colorado, where the eastern part of the state is formed by the Kansas plains and the western part of the state is made up of the Colorado Rockies. Because of the landscape, Colorado is one of the only places where there are both buffalo and cows. Storms almost always come from the west and roll in through the east. Cows can sense that a storm is coming, and they begin running east, in the same direction of the storm. Because cows aren’t terribly fast, the storm catches up with them. The cows continue to try to outrun the storm but end up running with the storm, prolonging the pain and suffering it brings. 

Buffalo do something different. Buffalo wait for the storm to cross over the crest of a peak of the mountaintop. As the storm rolls over the ridge, the buffalo turn and charge directly into the storm. They run at the storm and run straight through it, minimizing their pain and suffering. 

Both the cows and the buffalo are experiencing the same storm. The way they handle the storm is what is different. The way they handle the storm causes one to suffer more than the other.  

Are we cows or buffalo?

Humans tend to do the same thing as the cows. We constantly try to outrun and avoid inevitable challenges.

For the first two years after law school, I paid the minimum payments on my student loans, making the balance even greater than when I finished law school, only to have to pay back even more than I borrowed.  

Instead of bracing through and paying off our debt quickly, we allow it to weigh heavily on our shoulders as a burden, increasing our suffering. I often hear people say, “I’ll never pay back my student loans – I’ll just pay minimums for the for the next thirty years.” Meanwhile, the loans put a damper on so much of one’s enjoyment of life and ability to make choices. We’re hesitant to embrace challenges, which might be brief discomfort, and instead, we accept long drawn-out discomfort which ends up being, and feeling, more detrimental. 

Unfortunately, we don’t have a say in whether we will encounter storms. Whether your current storm is financial or otherwise, we all face challenges. We always will. We do, however, have a say in how and whenwe respond to them. We can choose to be like the cows or the buffalo.  

Is there anything that feels challenging to you that you might be delaying?