artofliving Archives

By Henryk Rodakowski Public Domain Wikimedia Commons

In anticipation of the Kentucky Derby held on May 2 of this year, I wrote about how horses accompanied Sherman throughout his life.This year’s derby was a race of a lifetime, a horse with odds set to 30-1 coming from the rear to cross the finish line first. The horse’s trainer is a woman, the first to have a winner in ‘the run for the roses’. And this accomplishment merits its own story.

But I digress since this is not about the races of the Triple Crown. Besides, this year there won’t be a triple crowned winner since the Derby winner will forego the upcoming Preakness. Here I continue my reflection on Sherman, his horses, and what I’ve learned from both his experience and my own.

Finish of the 1827 St Leger. Matilda beats Mameluke
By John Frederick Herring, Sr. –

It’s said that one doesn’t become an equestrian until falling off a horse at least three times. I’ve fallen off three times. I may or may not have become a better rider, in each fall. But I have learned something more about myself.

The first fall was off a pony. I presumed I would be able to convey my intentions without the use of any aids, like a bridle or a saddle to keep me seated. What did I learn? The concept of ‘thinking before acting’. True, at the time, I was a kid, and the lesson didn’t stick in my thought process until much later.

The second fall was an attempt to jump. The horse was in perfect form. But I was not. I was insufficiently prepared. So I had an idea of what I wanted but didn’t have the skill to achieve it. The third time I slipped out of the saddle at the horse’s canter. The only explanation is that my body at the time was not strong enough to support me. I was recovering from an illness which depleted much of my energy. In my mind, I could do what I did before. But my body was suggesting something different, and I wasn’t paying attention.

Fortunately, many horses know what their riders can or cannot do. If they’re good-natured, they’ll accommodate themselves, despite the confusing cues received from the person on top of them. They do so to assure the safety of them both. Other times, though, they get spooked out for whatever reason or none at all. Then it’s up to the rider to help them alleviate their fears. I have found in those cases it helps to think of the ‘calm, cool, and collected’ mantra, while hoping that one’s mind, body, and spirit are stacked to generate that response. I’m fortunate when a horse and I are able to ride through a ride together through moments of uncertainty by remaining calm.

Sherman had at least three falls and probably even more. I wrote about the first fall here. In his Memoirs he wrote about a fall which occurred while he was hunting in South Carolina. Apparently, he dislocated his shoulder. Years later during the famous Battle of Shiloh of the Civil War Sherman had three horses shot from under him. These horses ‘took the bullet’. It’s no wonder then that he would have a special bond with his war horses. How did Sherman feel when his horses perished in battle? He doesn’t say. But given the intensity of violence and the trauma that ensues, I’ll presume that he suffered from loosing his hoofed companions. Perhaps he realized that he was alive because of their fearlessness in battle mayhem.

He wrote to his wife Ellen about losing one of his favorite horses. Dolly, who was ‘stolen’ by the enemy (the horse was in transport on a supply train that was confiscated by the Confederates). But he joked that the enemy will be sorely disappointed when they realize that Dolly was not much of a battle horse as she bolted at the sound of gunfire. She preferred parades.

In their younger years, Sherman and Ellen enjoyed riding horseback through the countryside outside of Lancaster, Ohio. Sherman considered riding an important life skill and a necessary component to his children’s education. He wrote to his eldest daughter, Minnie encouraging her to continue advancing in horsemanship. He was proud of his ten-year-old son, Willie, riding alongside to ‘inspect the troops’ at the camp in Vicksburg.

Military training at West Point in mid 19th century included advanced equestrian skills, which Sherman and fellow officers in training took part. 40 years later, as a retired war general, Sherman voiced his objection when West Point scaled back courses in military equestrian skills. He argued that despite the advancement in artillery, training with horses taught transferable skills important in military strategy.

Sherman on his horse Duke Atlanta 1864, George N. Bernard Public Domain

Why did Sherman think horsemanship was still necessary? I’m not sure what he had in mind, but I’ll presume it has to do with the horse and rider analogies of Greek philosophy. Plato reworks earlier metaphors of a charioteer and his horses, to illustrate lessons in the pursuit of the good through correct reasoning and practice of virtue.
Horses have been necessary for human survival and flourishing for millennia. Up to as recently as early last century, humans relied primarily on horses to assist in transport and food production as well as military defense and conquest. It’s no wonder that thinkers observing horses and people together would come to insightful life lessons.

While perhaps no longer necessary for our survival, we can still learn from horses and benefit from their presence and interaction with them. Watch horses in motion as Leonardo daVinci clearly did, or watch a child interact with a pony to see what you can learn.

Charioteer of Cyzicus, Relief 6th Century CE,
By G.dallorto – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5 Wikimedia Commons

Following his mentor Plato, Aristotle also uses examples of horses to underscore intricate and abstract concepts. He advances his predecessor’s metaphor of horse and charioteer to elucidate his thoughts on human activity, temperament, and ethics. It’s not difficult for us to reflect on what we observe in nature, horses included. Analogies help make concepts accessible. Aristotle’s contemporaries had firsthand knowledge of what makes for a “good horse” (one who is fit, gallops well, and is responsive to its rider in difficult situations) for “the excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy”. Nichomachean Ethics Mkeon/Reeve 2001

Aristotle then gives examples of what makes for human excellence, for the virtue of [a person] also will be the state of character which makes one act well Nicomachean Ethics Bk II Ch 5 Here and elsewhere, Aristotle makes an important distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge, the latter leading to skill acquired through practice and experience. We have opportunities to watch a good horse and skilled jockey running at full gallop at the race tracks that comprise the Triple Crown. But that will not make us better riders. We need practice, what the Greeks called (φρόνησις) phronesis or practical wisdom.

As AI provides information generating vast amounts of contextual knowledge, the ability to make such distinctions in human activity becomes more critical. It’s one thing to ‘know’ what human excellence; what the ancient Greeks called ἀρετή arete, should look like and another to know how to live accordingly through intentional practice.

I consulted ChatGPT to explain these distinctions. It did so in less than a second. But while its computational algorithms provided me with a certain amount of reliable information, it’s up to me to evaluate the information and to decide to how to respond.

Further, I need to make a decision to strive for excellence or ‘the good’ and then practice doing so Practiced excellence comes not only from an idea of what it should look like but also knowledge gleaned from the hard task of ‘doing the work’ to achieve it.

Sherman and his contemporaries learned such lessons in the art of living in part from the patient horses that accompanied the

True, we also need teachers to deepen the learning process and guides to encourage us. Further, horses feature less or not all in many people’s day to day experience. And even with support we have from the environment and people around us we may find that the challenges in life exceed are present capacities and skill sets. That’s when it helps to think about what horses can teach us.

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein from his own experience puts it succinctly:

“I sit astride life like a bad rider on his mount. I owe it solely to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off right now.”
L. Wittgenstein 1939-1940

Horse and Dog
By Alfred Steinacker Wikimedia Commons

boba-jovanovic-nfQo34LLCVY-unsplash — Photo by Boba Jovanovic on Unsplash

At the end of March New York Times reported: “COVID-19 is the largest public health crisis in modern American history. To date more than 17,000 cases have been detected and 200 people have died.” Four weeks later there are 1.5 million confirmed cases and close to 70,000 deaths in the United States alone. It’s the largest crisis our nation has faced in recent history. It has dramatically changed our world and our lives will not be the same as before.

However, COVID-19 is neither the first pandemic nor the last. A hundred years ago another pandemic generated similar disruptions. Between 1918-1919 fifty-to-one-hundred million people died in a year and a half — 650,000 in the United States. (smithsonianmag.com). Older adults with underlining health conditions are the majority of fatalities of our pandemic. But the majority of lives taken during the 1918-1919 influenza were those of otherwise healthy young adults. Many stricken, soldiers of WWI returning to the States contracted the flu while in Europe. They became sick rapidly while on board closed quarters of ships. Within hours of displaying symptoms, people’s conditions would worsen and they would die.

While the epidemic reached every part of the country including remote Alaskan villages, Boston and several other U.S. port cities were hit especially hard. It’s not clear why healthy young adults were particularly prone to catching the disease and succumbing to death. My grandparents were young adults at that time. They survived–or I wouldn’t be here today. Unfortunately, the stories of how my predecessors persevered are now buried with them. Thus, I’ll have to conjecture based on snippets from historical research and generational storytelling.

Photo by Gabriele Strvinskaite on Unsplash

My great-grandfather Paul Thorndike was a surgeon at Boston City Hospital and an early advocate of meticulous hand washing and the disinfecting of surgical instruments prior to operations. As late as the beginning of the 20th century little was known about how germs spread. Presumably my great-grandfather had contact with people of Boston who had contracted the virus. Maybe he was even one of the specialists brought to Fort Devens 20 miles west of Boston to examine the young soldiers returning to the US with this deadly unknown virus. In any case there’s no record of him contracting the illness and he lived for another twenty years. His wife, my great grandmother Rachel, did not. A second wave of the virus surged in the fall of 1919. She was one of the several thousand who contracted it and died in October of that year. Her obituary omitted the cause of death; focusing rather on details of the funeral. David Brooks commenting on the PBS NewsHour in early March noted that the influenza of 1918-1919 was widespread and swift. People of all ages died within several days of showing symptoms. Families weren’t able to cope with how fast they were losing their loved ones and often they had to bury their own relatives. Brooks’ point was that people came up short either by lack of financial resources or by circumstances less blameless; the nation wanted to move quickly past the tragic state of affairs.

Paul and Rachel Thorndike’s youngest daughter, Anna, my grandmother, was in France volunteering with the Red Cross when her mother got sick and died. Since travel was still by ship in those days she didn’t return home in time for the burial. A few years later, Nan met her future husband, John Rock, who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1918. Earlier he had tried to enlist in the army to fight in the Great War but failed to qualify. Strangely, it appears from his journals he had little if anything to do with providing medical assistance during the pandemic. After graduating he began studies and work specializing in the fields that eventually shaped his long medical practice and research in gynecology and obstetrics including for the working poor of the tenement slums of Boston. Helen Allingham, my father’s mother migrated from New Brunswick, Canada and worked as a nurse’s aid. What were her stories? Facing death daily? Or perhaps caring for the sick in other hidden ways. Who knows? Her stories, like those of my maternal grandparents and their parents from those years, are also forgotten. As a child I remember that she would insist that hand washing, Cream of Wheat and cod liver oil were the best ways to boost the immune system. It never entered my ten year old brain to ask her why.

Two of my grandparents died before I was born or shortly thereafter. The other two were alive while I was writing high school and college essays on what makes for a meaningful life. But it never occurred to me to ask people around me who had lived full purposeful lives how they did so. Maybe that’s still true nowadays; it doesn’t occur to us to ask those who are older and presumably wiser how they faced challenges when they were our age. On the other hand, maybe a pandemic can actually wake us of out somnolence. We can think to ask questions that matter. What can I learn from my ancestors? Maybe I would ask Paul Thorndike and John Rock how and why they chose medicine and what helped them persist in finding solutions to dire human conditions. I would ask Rachel what was it like to care for her own parents when they died. I would ask my grandmother Nan about driving ambulances in post war France and my grandmother Helen about nursing with little training and resources during a pandemic. What can I do to transform knowledge into an art of living of one’s own shaping? How do my decisions and behavior impact the lives of the people around me? Do I care?

If there were ever a time to reflect on what it means to live an intentional, meaningful or caring life it would be now during a crisis that impacts everyone of us. First responders and health care works show us how to strengthen resilience and cultivate compassion. Data may determine public health policy and even best practice for preventing spread of a virus but it doesn’t show me how to care for people around me. Data doesn’t teach me how to be kind and merciful. We may not be faced with such epic moments of life and death. But we all are faced with the challenge of going beyond the froth of a superficial living and navigating into the deep; the wind and waves of a live well lived. Choosing to do so will make all the difference.