Books

If this book offers anything, it is permission to sit with the questions rather than rush to answer them, and to accept that sometimes the value of a life is not found in what it returned, but in what it willingly gave.

But that was the world I grew up in. You didn’t need reasons to be smacked, or worse, only timing. A version of Cat Stevens Father & Son delivered long before the song became a hit where “from the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen” became the path.

And in the middle of that simplicity came the first real acknowledgment of my “value”: my grandfather pressing eleven dollars, actual paper notes, ones and twos, into my hand as payment for mustering and shed-hand work during shearing. Eleven dollars. It might as well have been a fortune.

Every improvement felt like a step closer. Every miss felt like a personal failing.

Every perfectly placed round felt like an affirmation, proof that I could control something, even if it was only a piece of lead flying through the air at three thousand feet per second.

But when you’re young, emotionally feral, and living on a farm where tempers simmered like a drought about to break, the horse becomes something else entirely. Not a pastime, an anchor. A pressure valve. A way out.

This was the first nudge away from academic idealism. The first moment where the plan, the unspoken promise that I’d thrive, met Steinbeck’s truth: the best laid plans of mice and men often do go awry.

I sat up, rubbed sleep out of my eyes, and started flicking through the classifieds out of sheer novelty. I’d never held a city paper before. The thing was enormous, like an atlas. The job ads alone could have been used to wall-paper a modest house.

We weren’t poor, but we weren’t thriving either. Every step forward cost something, money, time, energy, opportunity. I was juggling: a growing family, a fledgling accounting career, night classes, sport, debt, ambition, fear, and a relationship stretched thin by the pressure of all of the above