It must have been nice to be a cowboy back in the 1800s. Sure, there were things like shorter life expectancy, illnesses that couldn’t be cured and every now and then a pack of wild Indians would come and try to kill you and steal your horse. But it had to be a much simpler way of life and thought process than we deal with today. Sometimes when you are going wide open, 90-to-nothing, you don’t have time to recover when you get “shot” while you are traveling down the trail.
What is the trail? Today in my world, the trail is what I like to call the journey through a week and through life. Some people call it a journey, the road, a mission, a voyage but to me when I’m out and about I like to refer to it as being on the trail. And no, in case you were wondering I am not a golfer and am not talking about a golf trail. To me, the trail is encompassing of all the places that I get to go to day in and day out, along with all the people that I get to meet while out working and traveling.
So what does it mean to get “shot on the trail”? This is when something bad happens and it happens while you are living your life on the trail. One day it may be a call from the office saying that a great employee has turned in a two week’s notice, or an email from a client saying that they respectfully no longer want to use your company’s services. Also included are when you get some really bad news about something or a client is madder than hell about something that you did or didn’t do. The list can go on, but you get the idea of things that I consider to be getting “shot on the trail.” We use to employ a company motto that said, “No Bad News on the Road.”But with the increasing power of communication devices and also how often I am out on the road (or in my case trail), we have done away with that motto because there simply isn’t enough time in the office to deal with all the bad news. Nowadays, the bad news and mishaps just hit you when they want to hit you.
The bad part about getting shot on the trail is you generally have more time to think about what just happened and sit there and ponder why it all just happened to you. It’s easy for bad things to happen, but you are moving so fast that you can easily forget them. It’s not always that easy when you have days to think it over or long hours in the plane or in a hotel room with nothing to do is think about it. So occasionally you have moments of weakness, moments of emptiness, moments of elevated anger and sinking moments when the news is so bad you just sink into your chair and wonder if you will have the power to get yourself up.
There is no moral to the story or easy way to recover from getting shot while on the trail. The best advice I have for myself is to keep on moving and try to move at a higher rate of speed after being shot than you were before you were shot.