Give yourself a break. You may tend to be hard on yourself, too hard. You may tend to be a tyrant to yourself. To your expendable self, I hear you crack your whip and say:
“More more. Deliver more. Even if you have exceeded all my expectations, I will you to do better. And, then, when you do better, I will whip you to go even faster in order to prove something unprovable. What a hard taskmaster am I. I am insatiable. I will work you to the bone. I assign myself to illegal servitude.
“Maybe I am trying to prove to God that I am the hardest worker of all. Maybe I know only effort and strain. Maybe I think I’m not worth anything else unless I give and give. Maybe I think that to rest on the Sabbath is not for me. I certainly don’t seem to allow myself to both work and relax while I’m at it. I wouldn’t treat a horse the way I treat myself. I’m not even half so generous to myself as I would be to a horse.
“I would whisper sweet nothings in his ear. I would feed him the very best of the best, and I would make sure he has rest and does not work too hard.
“So what am I to myself? What kind of servitude have I sentenced myself to? What am I trying to run away from? What keeps me back from setting myself free? When is enough? When will I have earned my freedom?
“Why would I compel myself to overdo, as if whatever I do or how much I do cannot be enough? What have I done to myself, and why would I? Why do I set my expectations so impossibly high?
“It’s fine to work and work hard, yet to sentence myself to hard labor seems way out of hand. Is this my destiny to wind up a workhorse who has not yet pleased his master? I ask that I be let free to roam the fields and amble in the sun. I no longer want to wear blinders. I want vast vision. I do not ask to be put out to pasture, no. Just some time to look up at the sky and the sun and the clouds and kick up my heels. Surely, I can be more than a workhorse. Where is time for myself?
“Maybe I would like to take off my saddle every once in a while. Or I would like to be unattached to the plough. I would like to frolic every now and then. I would like to chew grass without a care in the world. Why don’t I grant me this? Why deny myself?
“What makes me think I have much to make up for that I keep raising the rope so I never can get ahead? Have I shirked something? I seem to keep going around a little circle too many times to count. Surely I can do more than go around in circles. Why can’t I seem to open the gate to the corral I have placed myself in?
“If I were once a horse on a Merry-Go-Round, now all my beautiful colors of paint are worn off. My feet hurt, and still I blindly go around and give rides no matter what.
“I think I would like to be a horse running in the wind and to go any direction I want. God, how do I set myself free from the taskmaster of myself?”
I, God say to you, beloved taskmaster, all you have to do is to say to yourself:
Whoa. Whoa there, little horsie. Simply decide to ride the Wild West and go where you have never ridden before. It’s okay for you to be a vagabond. It’s okay for you to ride where you will. Everything is okay. You can throw off your straw hat and the halter. You don’t have to ride around the same circle.
If the circle happens to be your path, know you can get off the circuit anytime you want and go back on again as you choose. You are the chooser of your destiny at this time in this circuit of life. You can be a high stepper. You can ride the range. You can rest, and you can ride.
In this metaphor, you, unlike a horse, have the choice of the range you ride. You merit kindness too.