Little Rex

“Wake up. Be awesome!”

Heather Dietel

How high can you jump? That’s not a question we usually ask ourselves, but I found out just that, when I was twelve years old.

My Aunt Janice offered to pay my cousin and me to paint her barn. We jumped at the opportunity, so to speak, because Stephen and I were in desperate need of the essentials: hamburgers, candy, and movie tickets. This seemed like an easy path to all three.

There were six horses in Aunt Janice’s barn. Galvanized piping created individual outdoor corrals for each horse’s stall. We got the idea to slide a few pipes across each stall door as we painted our way around the barn. That kept the horses inside, while we painted outside.

It worked pretty well, until we got a bit careless and spooked a two-year-old stallion named Little Rex, as we noisily slid pipes across his door.

Little Rex wasn’t little, and he exploded out of his stall like a cannon shot directly at me. I had just enough time to run two steps and throw myself over the top of the corral. Had I hesitated a moment, I think he would have trampled me.

That day, I found out in an instant how high I could jump. It’s amazing what we can do when we have to. The capability is in us, though we don’t necessarily realize it. So here’s the question:

How much do we want our vision of our best life going forward, and are we really giving it our best to get there? Because when we do, we can fly. I know; Little Rex saw to that.