Live Your Life-It can change in a Heartbeat!

I just watched the Kentucky Derby today.  I normally don’t watch horse racing but I knew my father-in-law was at the track and he’d be excited about that race so my husband and I and my bro-in-law and mom-in-law decided to turn it on.  It was an exciting race, but a tragic one for one of the horses-actually the one horse that I bet on to win (in our fake betting game the 4 of us were playing). I fake-betted on Eight Belles, the only female horse in the race-so of course I had to cheer her on!  She ended up coming in 2nd- and then for some reason, seconds after finishing, the camera zoomed in on her laying flat on the ground with people racing to her aid.  

We didn’t know what happened at first, but I had this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.   When animals get hurt it just hits me in such a soft spot in my heart.  When the announcer finally came on with one of the vet doctors on the scene, they said she broke both her front ankles and there was nothing they could do. She was in a lot of pain so they had to euthanize her on the spot. Right then my heart sank and I just about cried.   They showed the replay of the race and I thought to myself, one second she’s here, the next she’s gone.

Then I thought about how life is like this. How fast things change. You are here one second, gone the next. Feel good one minute, feel pain somewhere the next. Cry one minute, laugh the next.  And then I thought about my reaction.  I could be sad and hang on to that feeling and be depressed about it the rest of the night, or I can choose to feel ok.  It was another aha moment for me when I realized once again that ‘you can change your thoughts if you are aware of them’.  Of course I felt so bad for the horse, but I decided it didn’t do me any good or Eight Belles any good for me to hang on to this feeling.  She ran an incredible race…maybe she even thought she had run the best race of her life!

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