“I keep lashing at my horses with my whip clenched in a spasm.”

If you’re over thirty, you’re accompanied daily with that feeling – life moves fast. And it gets faster with every birthday.

To deal with it, most people put their heads down and work harder. And longer. But it doesn’t seem to help.

Vladimir Vysotsky, an iconic Soviet-era Russian singer, poet and actor sang it like this:

On a rugged cliff, the very edge, above the endless chasm
I keep lashing at my horses with my whip clenched in a spasm
But the air is growing thinner, I am gasping, drowning, crying
I can sense with horrid wonder, I am vanishing, I’m dying

Slow your gallop, oh my horses! Slow your gallop I say!
Don’t you listen to my stinging whip!
But the horses I was given, stubborn and so unforgiving,
Can’t complete the life I’m living, can’t conclude the verse I’m singing

Time marches on. That we can’t control.

But riding out-of-control horses? That’s often our own making.

We whip our horses – while we yell for them to slow down.

I will perish, as a feather that the hurricane has swallowed,
In a chariot they’ll pull me through the snow in blinding gallop
All I ask of you my horses, slow your pace but for a moment
To prolong the final seconds of approach to my last comfort.

We’ve come in time: there is no such thing as being late for God, –
But why are angels singing with such fiendish scolding voices,
Or is it that the horse bell ringing in a frenzy drenched with tears,
Or is it I the one who’s screaming for my horses to shift gears?

Tomorrow I’ll share a life-altering lesson I’ve learned about slowing your horses.

For now, watch Vysotsky singing this song.

A friend who grew up in Moscow told me that while the Soviets hated this guy, the people loved him.

You could often walk down the street and his singing, heard through open windows, would accompany you the whole way.

It wasn’t his voice they loved, I’m sure of that. It was something else.  What do you think it was?  Let me know.

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