What’s the simple and, now obvious, lesson learned? Don’t let anything get wet that shouldn’t be wet in its natural state. Seal the leaks, fill the holes, let the beautiful Little Green baby frogs live outside. Water kills wood, rusts metal, destroys leather, drills holes in sandy arena floors.
Man, that old chestnut, Docta Ignorantia, has definitely gotten me in trouble a time or two. If you hang around with me for very long, you’ll hear obsessive recriminations about a particular Docta Ignorantia. The one that will go down as my greatest. It’s that thing about water. The now, obvious fact, that water always wins. I mean think about it, or maybe I should be the one thinking about it, what carved the Grand Canyon? The Colorado River. Comprised of? You guessed it. Water.
In the midst of this, the indefensible, I state in my defense, my learned ignorance. I grew up in horse barns. Midwestern horse barns no less – yes this adds some contextual color. Places that were full of wonderful sights, sounds and smells. The perfect place for an introverted, shy, animal loving tomboy to grow up.
These old, Midwestern barns also seemed to always be wet. When it rained, after it rained, when it snowed, after it snowed, in an ice storm, after an ice storm – you get the picture.
So, walking into my barn and seeing the wet barn aisle, wet stall floors, wet arena sand. These things all seemed normal to me. Organic. Natural. Nothing clicked in my brain about how dangerous it is to be ignorant, nay, nostalgically embracing all of the wet.
One thing that really should have tipped me off was walking into my barn one morning and finding, no exaggeration, a million (well maybe a little exaggeration) beautiful little green baby frogs hanging out in the barn aisle. There had been a spring rain, making the aisle wet. Barn aisle should never be wet. And baby frogs shouldn’t be found in barn aisles. Honestly, I was so fascinated by the site of all these beautiful little green baby frogs that the fact that they live near, absolutely have to live near water, to survive, never crossed my mind.
And if that wasn’t enough to make me question the ‘wet’. The number of horse stalls that transformed into little frog ponds certainly should have. Yet another tell that should have signaled something in my brain – no flair was sent. Instead I remained in my cocoon of Docta Ignorantia. My cocoon of Learned Ignorance.
The fact that I rarely looked up also served to remove the foreshadowing of the oncoming doom. Instead I was happily focused on the wet aisle floor and all those beautiful little green baby frogs; the lovely smell of manure as I cleaned stalls; and managing the boundless energy of my new border collie puppy, Lucy.
Why look up when I was having so much fun looking down. After all looking up wasn’t where all the action happened, but it was where water met wood. Water and wood. Not good.
Honestly Docta Ignorantia might be a little too harsh, but not by much. You’ll find in earlier posts such as Lefty Loosey / Righty Tighty that, in the early days, I didn’t know the bare minimum as to maintenance, repair or how to use the tools required.
Do you want to know what happens when you start to learn something new? You realize that you know absolutely nothing. It’s a bit of a strange feeling. While ignorance might be bliss, having just enough knowledge to know that you don’t know all that you should know is a bit discombobulating. And I’d like to tell you that that’s when I finally looked up. But it wasn’t.
You know what finally made me look up? Looking down. Looking down on the floor of my big sandy arena and seeing a piece of rotted wood. What in the world is rotted wood doing on my arena floor? That’s when I looked up and that’s when I saw all the wood rot and that’s when real learning began, when the real work began and all my ignorance began to disappear.
I have to admit that looking up was a bit overwhelming. I wanted to go back to my cocoon of learned ignorance but once you know something, you can’t go back to ignorance. Why would you want to? I wish that I could express how empowering it feels, what a confidence boost it is to understand the problem, why it exists, and how to fix it. Believe me when I tell you that it doesn’t mean that you get it right the first time but taking action, even if it’s Imperfect Action is a beautiful, beautiful place to be.
Now what’s the simple and, now obvious, lesson learned that’s contained within this blog? Don’t let anything get wet that shouldn’t be wet in its natural state. Seal the leaks, fill the holes, let the beautiful little green baby frogs live outside. Water kills wood, rusts metal, destroys leather, drills holes in sandy arena floors.
And because of my Docta Ignorantia I have certainly created more work for myself then was there when I first bought the barn. Given that I had more than enough work to start, this is not a good thing. And, again because of my Docta Ignorantia, my energies have, to date, been focused on major repairs versus barn beautification. You’ll find these repairs in current and future projects like My White Whale. Moby Dick’s Got Nothing on This, My Little Red Barn and even in Frankye Sue’s Shoe Repair. If you have a sense of the ironic, all the references noted above are projects that were required because of water.
As in all of our major failures, all of our Docta Ignorantia, we learn and we never, ever forget what we learn. So, like me, don’t be too hard on yourself when you fail. Failure makes life so very interesting. Failure forces us to take action. To make change. To do something. To fix. I was not the brightest when it came to water and wood, and metal, and sand, but I’m fixing it and it will never happen again.