Onwards and Upwards

Because...What Else Are You Going To Do?

Thomas Edison, (you know, the light bulb guy,) famously stated that: “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Fortunately for equestrians, passionate horsemen and women have spent some 4000 years or more finding ways of interacting with horses that don’t work well, while writing about the ways that do. These often philosophically inspired writers are sometimes revered as much as any spiritual guru, and often regarded as fountains of indisputable truth. All in all, horse people have a tremendous library to draw from, but truth told, few do. And even those who do, still will have their own journey to travel.

The point being, that one way or the other, life with horses is an excellent training ground for Life itself.

So everybody makes mistakes, also known as mis-takes, but not everyone handles the aftermath of a mis-take the same. In that regard, horses are extraordinary amplifiers of human behavior and tend to bring out both the best and the worst in us, giving us a chance to take a, sometimes painful, closer look. Often when we have mis-takes on horseback, how we handle the consequences can tell an observant person more about us than we’d probably ever care to tell.

Ask any friend or family member of an avid equestrian, they’ll tell you.

Horses are the great equalizers of the sports world. In most equestrian endeavors, it doesn’t matter if men are physically stronger; if a female rider is more talented, has better technique, more experience, or even just a better horse, she can still beat him every chance she gets. Horses level the playing field and they don’t care how much they cost you; their price tag does not guarantee results. If you can ride, you can play, and horses take you as you come. Or not.

Not everyone handles this well.

Further to the point, horses are great humblers. Is that a word? A horse will buck off the best dressed, smartest, prettiest, most handsome, wealthiest person in the crowd just as swiftly and effectively as the poorest, ugliest dolt dressed in rags. Horses have their own code of ethics and don’t care a whit about where you shop or went to school.

So while there may be no crying in baseball, there can be plenty of both literal and metaphorical crying in the company of equines as we scale a learning curve that often feels as formidable as just about anything Life may throw at us. There can also be plenty of cussing, exasperation and exclamations, and as time goes by, trainers and teachers of horsemanship tend to develop habitual phrases to help their students deal with these episodes.

There are many such phrases, but they can all pretty much be summed up in one popular expression that covers it all, if somewhat rudely.

Shut Up and Ride.

Ahem. If seeking to be a little more polite, one might cut through the drama and use the phrase: Onwards and Upwards.

The bottom line is, stuff happens, and other things, too. And if you’re on the back of a 1200 pound animal moving at speed, there is no time to dwell on what happened some ten, twenty or thirty bounding strides ago. You are already at the next challenge, probably imbalanced and off-kilter, and Life is impatiently waiting for you to get focused, get back in the Now and get on with it.

Horses are experts on the Here and Now, and on forcing us to join them there. That said, they weren’t born with a handbook and the link to a how-to YouTube video instructing them on how to handle humans and make the best use of their demands. They weren’t born speaking Human, or with an innate understanding of how to best handle the demands of carrying weight. They have to figure us out as much as we do them. It’s part of their alluring mystery and charm.

The best place and time for equestrian discovery, as with anything in Life, is in the present moment. Often riders have a good ride and foolishly expect every ride thereafter to build on that, then suffer disappointment when the horse has different ideas and reverts to yesteryears behavior. Like leaving all senses at the barn door and leaving their rider in a mud puddle to ponder their naïveté.

We are forced to wake up to the new day dawning and ride the horse that showed up today, and when a mis-take happens, even if it’s for the umpteenth time, there is little time and no point in pro-longing the suffering over a mis-take that is already in the past. The ride demands that we glean what learning there is to be found and put it to good use, and quick, because the moment we’re in now is demanding our full attention if we’re to make the most of whatever the moment before us brings.

Take time, but don’t waste time.

                                          ~Arthur Kottas, former First Chief Rider at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.

When we exclaim, expound, sigh and bemoan a mistake, we are squandering precious moments and countless opportunities for learning, rebalancing and realigning with our goal. We are closed off to the present, blinded by our pain. We are stuck in a long gone past and not preparing for the next instant, nor open to the possibilities for correction that were inherent in the last thirty strides of our ride.

Or the last thirty seconds, minutes, days…years. Fixated on the thing that went wrong, we become so fixated on the pain and humiliation of it, we condemn ourselves to repeat it.

There is a saying that some people live 99 years, while some people live one year 99 times. There are simply people that know how to move onwards and upwards, because… what else are you going to do?

Waste the rest of a ride that may be perfectly wonderful precisely because you took the lesson and applied it well?

Turns out it’s true. There’s no use crying over spilled milk, bungled rides or fumbled baseballs. Time waits for no one, it simply shrugs as it flows ever onwards, ever upwards.

We can ride the current, or we can wallow in the hollows.

Talk To Me!

Do you have a favorite equestrian principle you’d like me to talk about? Do you have a favorite non-equestrian saying you’d like me to look at through the eyes of an equestrian life coach? Or do you just have a great question or idea for a subject matter you’d like to see me write about? Then drop me a comment below and let me give it a go! Credit will be given for source of inspiration.