Spurs: Empowering Trajectory

Spurs: Empowering Trajectory

Samuel Bird

When I woke up this morning, I saw a pair of spurs hanging on a brass hook in my pine wall. I looked at them as the memory that they were supposed to remind me came into view. I was a nervous and twitchy fifteen-year-old kid with more miles than my years would suggest and a deep sense of being jaded by a life I had only had a decade and a half. I stepped out of the ranch house and saw a crystal clear sky with not a cloud to distort it. This sky met a landscape that rolled and dropped with hills, mountains, valleys, and veins of canyons one after the other. One thing not to be seen was anything that suggested my kind had ever settled this area other than a tired four-strand barbed wire fence. I grew up on small farms and ranches, but these thirty-six thousand acres and an hour drive for groceries gave me a distance from a society I detested. I stood there nervous for what would happen as I was hundreds of miles from home, and barely knew the cowboy I would share all of my time with. He eventually woke up and we had biscuits and gravy while he ran me through the plans as I looked up at his Cherokee face with wide eyes. We irrigated the fields and I struggled to eat the minnows we caught. We saddled the horse and I struggled to ride. We pushed the cows back down the canyon and I struggled to steer my horse. When we got back for the day, I was tired and ashamed of how out of my element I was. We got back to the old pine barn under yellow light as I tried to pull my saddle off. The old cowboy came over and made a few jokes at my expense. With the glimmer in his eye, and him saying what I was thinking, the shame was lifted in part. I realized as lost and confused as I was, that I shouldn’t hate it. It was at the very least something I could laugh about. I hung up my reins and saw a pair of curved metal bands, strapped to leather with a gear-shaped wheel on them. “Those are spurs?” I asked. “Well, they ain’t chickens, that’s for sure.” I remembered back to the old cowboy movies of my childhood. “They sure are neat.” I pulled them off the stick they hung on and looked at them. “Do you think I could use these next time?” He laughed. “Ol’ Indian here is a good horse and he don’t need it.” He said as he patted the back of the horse that had been patient with my meandering all day. The cowboy looked at me with that same glimmer as some of his old grit came with it. “Plus, you can’t just start using spurs anyhow. You have to do what I did when I was younger.” “What did you do?” “I earned my spurs.”

Over the next three months, I went on many more cattle drives. The day finally came that I could do them alone. I’d jump off my horse and kill a rattlesnake to take back to the old cowboy who knew how to cook them up just right. I got good at ironwork and made myself a little knife. I carried a little six-shooter on my side. I broke mares, geldings, colts, and nearly my back in the process. I ran heavy equipment and had even ran a few right off the road. I failed, succeeded, tried again, and never gave up. It wasn’t what the cowboy life gave me that I loved, but that I had to fight so damn hard to get it. I stayed up late nights with that old cowboy talking about God, love, working hard, family, and the deep anger he saw in me with an eye that looked his younger self in the mirror. This was the first time, I told someone why I was so bitter. I told him that I was there because my mother was worried my father would kill me if I didn’t get out of town. He teased me and poked at me with a jovial love, though usually pretty insensitive. My greedy habits as a hungry kid became me buying treats on my simple cowboy salary to share. I watched as he apologized to me. It was the first time I saw someone do that, and I quickly learned how to do it back. We got into big fights, told each other what was on our hearts, and all along the way had fences to mend, canyons to ride, and horses to break. The end of the summer came as I had long sun-bleached hair, olive skin closer to his complexion, and something lifting up a heart used to lifting weight alone. No words were said as we looked at each other with mist in my eyes, and tears in his glimmer. He didn’t say a word as he pulled out a shiny chrome pair of spurs with a nice black band. I tried not to choke up as I tried to cope with the best thing in my life up until now was ending, and that I had also lived it right. I put them on my boots to find he had adjusted them on the anvil when I wasn’t looking. I stood up to hear them clink and whir. He looked down at me to continue the longest he had been serious in years. “You earned them, kid.”

This tender part of my life will forever be a legacy I try to let live on in my life. I went back to being a cowboy, but eventually the time came when I had to move on to new and different battles. I hung those same spurs in my dilapidated bedroom when I first got out of jail, on the wall of my college dorm, and I just bought another pair to take to my office. I am as sentimental as they come, but there is something more forward-looking that these spurs do for me. It is about impossible for a broken kid to fix themselves while fighting uphill, graduate college with a fifth-grade education, come out of homelessness, and work to become a writer with a vital message when I was barely literate. All, are nearly impossible and I like to fight possibilities. Like many people, I have a view of myself that is entangled with an evaluation of those qualities. I often evaluate toward the lesser desired side of the spectrum. I have a lot of things about me that stand between me and my goals, I fail to fit into society at large, and I have a life so different from others, I have to find it meaningful alone. There is one thing about me that I see only as a good. It is what I would call my greatest strength, and with my philosophical system in mind, it is a pretty good one to have. When chaos looms, when crisis erupts, when loss transpires, when suffering peaks, when evil mounts, I trust myself to saddle up. I’ll be confused, angry, weak, and a little dumb, but I will be there. I have wondered how I was going to do the next hard thing in my life such as get over the loss of a loved one, heal an addiction, turn myself in and pay for what I had done, but each time I was reminded of what I had done and how brutal it was. It has taken a little bit of mental gymnastics to figure out how staying on a bucking bronc is the same as writing a term paper, but humans are good at that kind of thing. I definitely don’t have the lighter and fluffier confidence most talk about. My crooked teeth, crooked nose, and scars remind me, looks is not how I win people over. What I do have is a much deeper and persistent sense of myself. I know what I do. When no one looks, I know exactly how I tend to act. I know how I respond to pain and labor. I look at this, and I assume I will have a similar trajectory for the future, and I am comforted. 

You may not have been a cowboy and know nothing more than a toddler about horses, but this vital lesson can be of use to you. By the merit of you being human and being alive long enough to learn how to read, you have no doubt had something that you have overcome. You may say it was only so big or impressive, but it did happen. You did it. You did it once. We can then use inductive logic to infer you could do it again. That isn’t a guarantee or promise. You will still have to show up and put in the work, but the cool part is, that you can. You may have to figure out how to see your past overcomings as something that applies to what you confront now. I have found that when you see this as your goal and just seek to make it make sense, you will find it. No doubt you have objectives now for a better world, self, and actions that bring that about. From my experience, most people have a good enough idea of what to do next. The bigger problem is that we don’t do it. Within the inner world, ideas flash past you. They have associated evaluations and actions to bring them about. You can’t just see a pastry, but also a sense of its sweetness and a desire to lift it to your lips. These thoughts come past you as nothing more than meaningless offerings. They act as pure suggestions and do nothing to shine on your character until you begin to act on them. As I discuss in my article, “whatever you do, don’t be weak,” I suggest that our objective should be to act on them or not with the greatest degree of accuracy. This would be accuracy, in reference to our Esse Maxim. This would be the follow-through of living deliberately. Our power to choose and sense of ability to do so, is one of the most critical inputs to our consciousness. I think if there was only one thing I could do for a given stranger, it would be to support them in their agenthood. There are many empirical tests on this, but to act at all, we need a sense that we can. In my case for freewill, I have a principled and pragmatic argument. For the pragmatic, even if we don’t have it, we need to think we do. I define philosophy as the relationship between self and world and as such, what I define as empowering would be that which prompts the inner world to think it can alter and act in the outer world. We certainly know how the world and its hosts of properties and facts can affect us, and it gives us strength to think we can act back. Having your own spurs will give you a case for your trajectory in acting on your Esse Maxim with exactness. 

On the more introspective and descriptive side, we can also look at our trajectory simply as it is. What is the general direction the narrative of your life has made? While you may be wrong, this rough idea can give you a sense of subjective optimism or pessimism. You will very likely see your life as a measurement of value that goes up or down. As value-centric beings in a valueless outer world, we would like to see that value going up. Simple awareness and internal honesty will help us have objectivity in seeing how this plotted line has gone. And now, for the big question. If that trajectory continues for the duration of what you expect to live, where will you end up? What is the trajectory of your life leading to? If your actions, beliefs, and Esse Maxim go at the rate of progression or degradation they have gone at, what will you say of your life as you lie down and let it come to a close? I would love to give you comforting lies in this, but I think you need to come to a conclusion outside of what you want it to be. You may be appalled with the direction of your life, or perhaps be rather content with it. I wager you will still desire something that is going to be different than what you are currently heading to. This can range from daunting to painful. You may sit down and wonder if you should give up in the process of taming this beast that is the entirety of your existence. I can’t make that creature any smaller nor make it any more gentle, but I can remind you to grab your spurs.