I guess when you're holding the creative reins, you can be across everything, and it's more authentic. You can control it.
Obviously I was well aware that I had what people consider a privileged upbringing. My mom was never a bake-cookies sort of mom. I really had no reins whatsoever.
In the story I eventually called 'Archangel' and published in 2008, Eudora MacEachern, working as an assistant to a surgeon at a hospital in Archangel, one night finds outside the gates an exhausted and frostbitten soldier crouched over the reins of a pony sleigh carrying the body of another soldier.
As athletes, we love to say, 'Just one more; I'm going to figure it out on this next one.' It's tough to pull back the reins and do what is smart physically, listening to your body and always ending a workout or session feeling like I could have done more.
A statesman, we are told, should follow public opinion. Doubtless, as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins and guiding them.
I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.
When people talk about conservative government, that's it in a nutshell. We're using taxpayers' money like we would use our own. We're holding in the reins during good times so we're prepared during bad times.
In my thirties, I felt I had hold of one of the reins some of the time.
When I first met my husband, I needed that helping hand to take the reins and look after me.
I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.
