She stared at him and then turned toward the pastures. “You see? If I were a horse,” she said, looking at the horses in front of them, “I could just eat, sleep, and the biggest problem I would have to work out is which blade of grass to pick up and eat.”
“And, if you were a horse,” Shane said immediately, “you would have your face to the sun, and you would enjoy the peace and quiet. You would be living in today, whether you had an injury or not. You wouldn’t be worrying about how other horses would see you. You wouldn’t be worrying about past horses you might have known, and neither would you be worrying about future horses that you have yet to find.”
She started to laugh and laugh and laugh.
He grinned at her.
“Oh, that’s good,” she said. “That’s really good.”
“And it’s true,” he said. “Remember. Stop pushing yourself so hard to find answers. What do you want right now?” he asked.
She rolled over so she could look at him and said, “Peace of mind.”
“That sounds good to me, and what is it that’s stopping you from achieving peace of mind?”
“Trying to figure out why I have stopped progressing.”
“And you can’t just let it be and realize that it’s a natural state of affairs?” he asked curiously.
She grimaced at that. “It feels like a cop-out when you say that you think it’s because of me, that I’m the one who slowed down my healing.” She nodded. “That’s how it feels.”
“Okay. Go with that,” he said. “What else is it that you need to do in order to change that?”
“I need to understand why I would slow my progress.”
“Because you’re afraid to succeed,” he said instantly.
“Oh, that’s a big one, isn’t it?” She flopped over on her back, put her arms up above her head, and smiled at the green grass tickling her fingers. “It’s so beautiful out here, and it’s so odd to think that we set ourselves up for failure.”
“We do it all the time,” he said.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked suddenly.
He smiled and said, “Not being good enough. That, should I end up in a place like this someday, would I handle it as well as the rest of you have? And another big one is not getting something that I really, really want.”
“And what’s that?”
“It doesn’t have to be anything specific,” he said, “but whenever I really, really want something, a part of me is terrified that I won’t get it. And, if I don’t get it, I’ll walk through life always feeling the lack of not having it.”
“Are we talking commercial things? You know? Like stuff. Like a teakettle?”
He bolted upright on his elbows and stared at her, saying, “Do you think I really, really want a teakettle?”
But she had a sassy grin on her face.
He shook his head. “No, but it’s like getting to be the physiotherapist that I am right now,” he said. “That was a goal. It was a really big goal, and it worried away at me for a long time—even when I graduated, and I had that piece of paper—that I wasn’t a physiotherapist until I had a job, working in this field.”
“Ah,” she said. “So achieving things.”
“Yes. But it’s not just about achieving things,” he said, “because there’s more to life than that.”
“I guess,” she said. “I can’t think of anything that I really, really wanted and couldn’t have.”
“Maybe you’re not the person who dares to care,” he said.
She rolled her head over to look at him. “No,” she said. “I think I care so much but know I can’t have what I want, so I already sabotaged my ability to have it. So, knowing I can’t have it, therefore, I don’t want it.”
He stared at her, then worked his way through the convoluted explanation. “Ah, so you refuse to think about it before you start? You won’t allow yourself to want because you already know you can’t have it?”
“Exactly.”
Chapter 13
Melissa knew it was foolish, but that’s how she felt. He picked a blade of grass and separated the leaf from it. She watched those very capable fingers as he worked away, his gaze obviously dropped down to study the grass. Yet she didn’t think he saw the grass but something else in his head. “What?”
He looked up and smiled. “I think it’s just a lack of security again,” he said, “because you’re so afraid you can’t have something, and there is bound to be a part of you that feels you’ll lose it anyway.”
“And that takes me back to my family, yes,” she said. “You don’t realize what losing your entire family as a teenager can do to you.”
“And yet, when will you walk away from it, recognizing that it’ll always be there,” he said calmly, “but not prepared to give it the power to ruin your future?”
She stared at him for a moment. “Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way. I don’t want it to be always determining my future.”
“However, if you hang on to that as your past,” he said, “it has to be something that determines your future because there’s no way it can’t. It is a part of you.”
“I know,” she said, as she was just realizing how much she let that part of her have control over her future. “You’re right. I don’t want it to have that much power, and I don’t want it to dominate my life, stopping me from getting something else I want.”
“Good,” he said. “Just understand that sometimes it’s likely to come up, and you’ll just recognize it and let it go. You don’t have to let it be that dominant in your world anymore.”
A bubble burst. Immediately such
