The textbooks all say that we sit on the horse, we half halt, we soften, and voila! They make their way up the levels, learning the work. Here on planet earth, sometimes we have to get ‘er done. Maybe we have to dig in and drive like hell for a few strides; maybe we have to hold a horse up for a while, until they can hold themselves up.
And when you ride mostly young and developing horses all day long, it’s easy sometimes to put your riding in that place, that training place where you have to help a lot, instead of sitting back and allowing the horse to show off all the work you both have put in.
It’s also hard, when you’ve known a horse for most, if not all, of its ridden life, to put your head in the space of riding said horse like he’s 8 or 9 and trained, instead of the baby you started riding however many years ago. I’ve encountered this phenomenon in my own riding before, on every horse I’ve had, but since apparently the learning curve is steep with me, here I am, learning it all again.
Because there I am, riding Fender and Fiero in their respective lessons, and I get told the same thing—they’re not babies anymore. You can stop riding them that way.
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Neither of them is an old horse—Fiero is 8, Fender is 9—but they’re also not green. I’ve done my job. I’ve trained them well. And so when I come into the canter pirouette, I can sit down, take a breath, and turn. They’re not going to quit on me. They’re not going to need me to carry them. They’re just going to do the pirouette, because that’s what I’ve trained them to do.
But without fail, on both horses, I round that corner and head onto the diagonal and my reptilian brain takes over.
My goal for the week is to turn that part of my head off, to try and ride the horse I have in the moment, and not the 4-year-old version, the 6-year-old version, the version I had a month ago. Progress is sometimes at a snail’s pace and sometimes lightening-quick. Staying in the moment is hard!
