It’s 2am and you are an illuminated thing in an otherwise dark room. You sit at the edge of the bed, and Doctor Google or ChatGPT MD just told you 17 different ways that you’re probably going to die. You hear a sound, faintly, and can’t quite place it…
Three dots blink on the screen of your last text message, they’ve seen what you said and now you wait for them to respond. The dots blink, and blink, and blink, and with every passing second you’re more convinced you’ve upset them, you’ve f’d up, you’ve ruined everything. There’s that sound again, louder now, it sounds like hoofbeats, like they are running…
The phone rings, it’s the dermatologist and you’ve been waiting a week for the results from your tiny little biopsied spot she carved out of your skin. Immediately your heart races, and you hear it again. It’s hoofbeats for certain, and dammit, it must be a Zebra. It has to be. There’s no other possibility.
Except, it’s probably not. Except, it’s probably a horse.
Dr. Theodore Woodward, an American medical researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, once delivered a wollop of wisdom in a single sentence to his students and fellow doctors, a piece of advice that is applicable to so much more than medicine. He said:
"When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."
Horses, not zebras. But not this time, say we, not us. It’s gotta be a zebra, it’s gotta be.
We hear those hoofbeats all the time in our lives, always at different volumes, and almost always we begin preparing ourselves for the worst. For extinction. After all, we think, it’s probably worst case scenario this time around.
Every headache could be a tumor, every bout of fatigue a sign of cancer that must be spreading through our body. Every bit of criticism at work could be a sign of our impending firing, every mistake we make whilst raising our children will surely cause permanent damage. One bad day in a relationship probably means we’re going to break up, right? Divorce right around the corner. These are the zebras we swear we see out of the corners of our eyes, the stripes racing past just on the periphery.
These are the wild creatures, untamed and still roaming the plains of our mental health. These are the feral cousins that refuse to be reigned, that trample the grasses and wreak havoc on our emotional property. These are the rare creatures that come so seldom we can nearly say never, that we convince ourselves must be racing towards us every single time we hear the sound of these metaphorical hooves.
Only we’re almost always wrong. I know not always, but damn near. There will certainly be times when the thundering sound in the back of our mind really might be a zebra, hell, might be an entire dazzle (did you know a group of zebras is often called a dazzle, or a zeal?!) of them racing our way and in that case, please do seek the help required, but mostly, almost always, it’s a horse. It’s just a horse.
Horses are ordinary, we think, while zebras rare. Horses are indeed ordinary, but they are also strong, they are also able to be led. Horses, we can gently rope and walk back through the gate. Horses, we can tame.
Tame we shall. Or should, at least. If zebras are chaos, if they are rarity, spectacle, and the worst case scenario we swear is upon us, horses are the opposite. Horses are familiarity, they are stewardship, they are hope, and they are the good news (or less bad, sometimes) in the face of what could be disaster.
I saw an interview with Jeff Bridges, THE DUDE, the other day, and he said something so simple and beautiful, it resonated enough to find its way into this post today. It was his advice on how to stay positive during tough times, when we’re waiting for that test result, when we’re watching those dots on that text message blink and blink, when it all seems to be falling apart. He said:
“We don’t know what’s gonna happen man…one of the things I battle myself, is Certainty. There’s nothing certain man, we don’t know how it’s gonna turn out.”
We must battle this certainty, because he’s right, we never ever know what’s going to come. We have a choice, and it is gifted to us every single time anything arises. We can assume the worst, we can imagine every single hoofbeat is another zebra charging directly at us, or we can hope for the best. We can wait, we can recognize that hope is not blind and naive optimism, but it is actionable. It’s a tangible decision that requires effort, and that effort is transformative.
We humans are built to expect the zebras, to arm ourselves against the worst that could be cresting the horizons of our days. In all aspects of our lives we ready ourselves for this false inevitability. We are so good at catastrophizing, but so innately horrible at going the other way, at falling on the side of hope. We have this bizarre tendency to hear these hoofbeats and convince ourselves of these zebras, these dazzles of stripes, and yes, sometimes they may well be. But. But. Mostly, they are horses, only horses, and those horses can be tamed, they can be reigned, and they can be brought back inside our gates.
Jeff Bridges got it right, we don’t ever know what’s gonna happen (man), and in this is freedom, not failure. Freedom, not fear. Certainty is what fear offers, it’s the make-believe answer to the question we don’t even need to ask. Fear shouts “I know exactly how this will end.” Hope instead whispers, “I don’t, but I’ll keep showing up anyway.” Hope is not denial. It’s not false positivity. It’s not even pretending. Hope is understanding that the vast majority of the time it IS horses and not zebras. It’s checking the facts, asking the second questions, waiting a bit longer to react. It’s tossing a lasso out over the necks of those horses, and gently walking them back inside the fenceline.
Most things are not catastrophic, friends. Most things are not worst case scenario. Fear loves certainty because it hates our patience in the unknowing.
Hope is not, and never has been, the belief that we’ll never hear the sounds of hoofbeats getting closer and closer. Hope is not the misconception that we’ll never see stripes at all. Hope is the understanding and overwhelming realization that they were probably just horses all along.
All the “zebras” you’re hearing right now, all the hoofbeats in the back of your brain, what are they really if you stop and look hard enough? Maybe we’re not meant to only seek silence in this life, only look for the moments without that thundering roar. Maybe, we are just supposed to notice the music their legs can make, feel it vibrate through to the center of us, and wait.
Just wait, to see what animal is actually coming our way.
