A World of Tame Horses

After graduating college, most of my friends in the graduating class got jobs. Some of them didn’t. 41% went to graduate school directly out of college, after having gone to college directly out of high school. I would hazard a guess that out of the unemployed graduates, most of them didn’t plan to be. Yet a large amount of the people who are going to graduate programs, especially medical school, will drop out for lack of motivation, and many of the people who went directly into the workforce aren’t doing what they truly want to be doing, or what they’d always hoped to do, and many are only in it for the money. But the familiar is comfortable, and when you stray from the widely recommended path you step into a world of uncertainty. Just like we’ve always been told that college is the immediate step after high school, work is the immediate step after college, if you are to be a real life adult. So we run in place and work hard and earn money to decorate our fishbowls and live out our dreams on three-week vacations and widescreen TV. But it’s hardly surprising that this rote life routine has become so acceptable and non-threatening. During some of the most formative years of our lives, we are taught many things, but we learn that a test is on a sheet of paper, that the answers will fit inside a dim pink oval, that there is always one correct and indisputable right answer, and that this measure of rote memorization is an accurate judgment of your applicable and critical thinking attributes; that someone else has discovered all the correct answers, that you should believe what you hear, and certainly believe what you read, provided it has been peer-reviewed and assigned by a professor.

And this is only what is often taught in higher academia – what about the people who never make it that far? The ones who are told in high school that they will never get a good job without a college degree, and so college is the only dream that one should have upon graduating? The ones who maybe college wasn’t right for after all, who shut down their dreams like outdated computers, and spend four years of their young lives driving themselves thousands of dollars into debt just to gain a competitive edge in the job market, and then be told that that isn’t enough anymore? And what of the ones who don’t go, and believe what they’re told, who work a local job and proudly work their way up, and exist, and watch the rich and the savants become marine biologists, actors, musicians, and nod and run in place and let their guitars sit and gather dust?

Tame horses learn to obey fences. A horse is an extraordinarily strong animal, one that would have little problem jumping the stacks of wood we create around them. Yet they stay put and eat grass, which is given to them, and sometimes they run, but not often, because they remain in the same place. They sustain themselves. They survive. Not because they are forced to, but because they choose to – because someone created guidelines, and said, “Don’t go outside this fence,” and that’s all they’ve known. You can’t expect them to suddenly retro-evolve a yearning for the wild and snap their invisible tethers – it’s a terrifying world out there, where the hay doesn’t come in bales and the fence doesn’t tell me where home is. They have learned, early on, to obey the fence.

Would they be happier outside? Would we? Who is to say? Wild stallions pounding prairie grass to turf and bucking at lightning certainly seem to be living an enviable lifestyle. Put a wild horse inside a fence and it will break down walls to freedom before you can turn your back. It cannot be kept – why obey a fence? It’s only a wood demarcation, separating one patch of grass from another, just a line in the sand. Wild horses run with a purpose. They wander the earth searching for something. Perhaps they will never find it – perhaps they already have. Perhaps in the search itself, they have found something worthwhile. Broken horses have no such desire – home is a patch of grass outlined with a few planks of wood, and they’ve never known anything besides that. Perhaps there is more, but life is easy here, and the woods are dark. Every day you sleep, eat, piss, run in place, eat, stand around, eat, sleep again. They teach their children to be tame, to stand close to them, to obey the fence. They chide the wildness out of them, as we discourage aberrant dreams of peering over the fence, college at our backs, trying to make out where in the woods the darkness ends and the light begins. And although it’s hard to see, we can dimly make out a world where the tests are moral, the answers require creativity and nuance and cannot be fit in a bubble, where there may be many right answers, or none, and where you may be forced to choose between them.  But we are a generation turned away. “Obey the fence, child,” we have been told with loving condescension, “to dream, you must first afford to dream.”