A Carrot Stretch

I was introduced to the carrot stretch this week. I didn’t know that you could stretch carrots – and it turns out that it isn’t the carrot being stretched anyway.

My sister has an equine therapy business down in Leicestershire. She does wonderful things with people who are not always coping well with life. To help her in her work she has a herd of horses. They don’t just stand in a field looking pretty but they are put to work navigating their way through problem solving scenarios with a person in tow. Fitness matters.

A niece explained what a carrot stretch was all about. It about ‘getting her head and neck to stretch as far as she can round both sides of her body and then one going down between her front legs to stretch her back muscles. She is doing this whilst following a carrot. Once she has stretched, she gets rewarded with the carrot.’ ‘Her’ is the horse in question.

The stick and carrot are things we are all familiar with and probably have varying views on what is most affective when getting people to do things they are reluctant to do. No sticks, just carrots and carrots used to stretch muscles that would otherwise not get stretched.

It makes me wonder what my carrots are? I was talking to a friend the other day about the need for flexibility and exercise. She talked about the lymphatic system and the sedentary life we all live and the health problems that crop up. Her carrot is a small trampoline and gently bouncing back to movement and wellness. She lives too far away from me to join her class. I boasted of my younger days trampolining. I never quite made a front somersault. A glitch in the way my inner ear works, or not, had me unbalanced mid turn. My friend doesn’t do somersaults.

But carrots. How much do we stretch out of our comfort zones to get something? I doubt if a horse would sniff at the chance of getting a carrot. It rates highly in the horse ‘I want’ scale. I am not that fussed about carrots. Having said that, the grow box company I am subscribed to has sent me the pot, the compost, the seeds and all the instructions for growing carrots this month.

But carrots. What is it I want so much that I am willing to do some stretching to get it? I began a creative writing degree course shortly after I retired. It wasn’t about the next job on the horizon. It was just about me doing something I had wanted to do for a long time. I can write a decent story, or a letter or a poem but the notion of doing these things better, properly, that was my carrot. Part time, eight years, and I’m halfway through. This year has been tough. The towel has been in my hand too often ready to be thrown into the ring. The creative muscles have been stretched – both sides of the brain, definitely stretching the mind that creaks a lot. I am doing things I probably never did in school way back. I have stopped saying that I can’t do it because I can. I might not do things as well as I would like, but I am learning. I am improving.

What we are stretching for has to be worth it or we will give in too quickly before we reach our aim. And the promise of a reward has to be real. Along one of the walls in the waiting room at the dentist I attend are lots of quotes about smiles. Some of those smiles come at a cost, but for the most part a filling here, a root canal there and maybe a brace can get the smile we are looking for. The dentist by having all of those quotes on the wall is making a promise to a patient – stick with us, stick with the treatment and you will get the smile. Do you want the smile that badly? If you do then you accept the carrot stretch.

I think we all need something to carrot stretch for. I used to tell the story of ants in a laboratory. There were two tanks. The ants in one tank got it all. The ant equivalent of the mansion, the Porshe and the private jet. The ants in the other tank got the basics, if even that. There’s was the ant equivalent of universal credit, a bus pass and a small overdraft. We can all guess which tank we would like to be in. However, despite all the luxuries, the ants in ‘millionaire’s row’ died off in a generation or two. They had nothing to fight for. The ants in the ‘wrong side of the train track’ tank, those ants thrived. It was in their carrot stretch for survival that they thrived.

So carrots. What’s your carrot? What are you carrot stretching for?

If you are not stretching? Learn from the ant tanks. Find something worth stretching for.