“There is a fine line between laziness and efficiency. Strive to always be on just the right side of it.”

This is one of my favorite sayings though I don’t practice it very well. I often find myself doing something the hard way though a modicum of time or effort would lead to a better, more efficient outcome. There are varying reasons for this. Stubbornness. Frugality. Mileage.

Every spring I ask my youngest son to till the garden. I can operate the tiller, but I don’t like replacing the tires, gas, oil, and belts. If he’s busy the day I ask, I start turning the soil with a garden fork. Instead of a soft, fluffy surface, I get big clods. The job takes days instead of an hour. It leaves me hunched over for hours (okay, days), unable to stand straight. And by the time I finish, he gets the tiller up and running and does it all over again.

There are other jobs I refuse to delegate because I’m tight with money. I would never pay someone else to shoe my horse. Thirty years ago, as a professional farrier, I could shoe two horses a day and trim hooves until the sun set (or later with supplemental lighting). Now, I work on a different schedule. The first hurdle is psyching myself up to start, but I can usually manage that in only a couple weeks. Armed with ibuprofen, I can shoe two feet the first day. Some recovery time follows. Usually, I can get both back shoes applied before the ones on the forefeet need reset in six to eight weeks.

Another job I can’t walk away from is training horses. I don’t have the expertise to prepare a horse for national competition (in any discipline), but I can teach go, stop, faster, slower, right, left, and backwards. First, I do ground work. This involves catching, leading, tying, grooming, loading in a trailer, picking up feet, saddling, bridling, and mounting and can be done in the horse’s first two years. Back in the day, I did those steps the first day of training while the stop-go-turn lessons commenced on Day Two. The most critical ingredient to proceed from ground work to actual riding is courage. What used to take a day now takes me years. My current training project is seven. He’s had a lot of ground work. Leads like a charm. Loads like nobody’s business. Stands for shoeing. One of these days, I’m going to open the corral gate and ride him out into the pasture.