Anyone familiar with Chaos Theory? I was a Liberal Arts major, so my stupendously basic understanding of it is this: When you step back and look at all the things going on, you can start to see patterns, even beauty, in utter mayhem. This horse show weekend, though certainly filled with its share of mayhem, was also rather beautiful.
Friday was great, horses settling in well, somehow missing the worst of the predicted rain (though we did end up loading the two horses coming to the show from our home base in the thick of it, resulting in the rain’s immediate cessation. Win one for Murphy.). I taught 10 lessons at the show, which were very efficient, since all the horses were great. We took a group out for Mexican food, a tradition, and I had a margarita the size of my head. And we went to bed.
But I first knew we were in for a great weekend when Stephanie had to wake me up on Saturday morning. For those who don’t know me, this isn’t just an unusual occurrence, me sleeping in – this is a serious statistical outlier. I don’t sleep through alarms, EVER. I don’t sleep past 5:30, EVER. This was a good omen.
And indeed it was. I parked my butt at the warm-up arena at 7:30 and stayed there ’til lunch, my groups of riders punctuated by small breaks when I got to tease my friend James about his haircut, or lack thereof (SO easy to do), catch up with friends I never get to see, and rest my voice. At lunch, I stopped at the food tent and got a grilled cheese with french fries (Nectar of the Gods; don’t tell Tony Horton), and had just sat down in the barn aisle when Michael, one of my students, pulled up on the water spigot to fill his horses’ buckets… and pulled the whole thing right up out of the ground.
Water geysered up at an impressive speed. The initial “OMG” went by. And then the beauty started.
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One ran to the show office. One pulled out his phone to call stable management. The rest formed a line and passed tack, brushes, totes, everything that was in front of the stalls out of harms’ way. Someone – incredibly quickly – found the water shutoff. It was like a dance.
Of course, then we had no water, some wet stuff and some haggard people, all about 10 minutes before the next wave of rides set in, but for a moment, the chaos was elegant.
I got to miss most of the aftermath because I had to book it back down to the ring, where I didn’t move again until 4:30. But we watched the Derby, ate Ruby Tuesday cheeseburgers, did night check, went to Target to get a bag of frozen peas for my temperamental right foot, and did it all again on Sunday, minus the exploding water. We came home with lots of ribbons and good scores, but even more importantly, lots of smiles and laughs.
And the best part? My students’ greatest successes were the riding and the smiling and the laughing, not our response to crisis. There was no hint of the chaos in any of my students’ tests. That’s where the real beauty was.
