The Map Is Not The Territory

The Process Is Not The Product

Never, ever, give up.  ~ Nick Vujicic*

As a dear friend of mine likes to say: “Listen, Toots, the map is not the territory.”

We set out on some journey towards a desired destination, but more often than not, we find out the actual getting there is absolutely nothing like what we’d imagined. We look at others that we perceive to have arrived and wonder how they did it. Maybe it seems like they’ve got it so much easier than us.

It’s hard to remember everyone is on a journey of some sort when we feel left behind. Envy is easy. It’s easy to say must be nice. What’s tough is when envy comes knocking, to remember everyone is a work in progress, and nobody ever gets to ride for free, despite appearances. What’s freeing, and energizing, is to say live and let live, and replace must be nice with something to aspire to.

Because even the most fortunate, talented person still has a piper to pay at the end of the road, and anyone who has made it to the top of anything worthwhile will tell you it’s 10% talent, 90% hard work. They are more often than not just the ones who stuck with it, the ones who didn’t quit despite the sacrifices they had to make.

But as they say in Latin: Dulcius Ex Asperis.

Sweeter After Difficulties.

On horseback or off it, Life can feel like a Sisyphean task and some days, like there are no good choices to be made except being content with showing up and not falling down - or off.

It’s easy to gaze at magazines and see beautiful people living beautiful lives in beautiful clothes (on beautiful horses)…and despair that we look nothing like them. What they don’t show us is the process that got them there. The thousands of rides, the thousands of hours, the sacrifices that led up to that photo. Lots of not so pretty photos they’ll never show you. The proverbial blood, sweat and tears.

Sure, sometimes they just started with a very different life (or horse) than most of us do. They still had to learn to ride it and nobody lives a challenge free life.

For six years, I’ve been working with a particularly challenging gelding named Franklin. I often joke I could write a whole book about Franklin, or at the very least, a blog. One of my heroes, the Portuguese Master of Dressage, Nuno Oliveira, said he didn’t want hard working riders. He wanted them to think hard. Well, no horse has made me think harder than Franklin.

Not everybody who knows or sees Franklin out and about at Dressage shows, Hunter Paces, or more recently, a Working Equitation Clinic, is aware of his past history. They simply see a big, handsome Hannoverian with near perfect manners, who carries himself with power and grace, and stands quietly napping before a class while people tell us they envy us. After all, he looks like the perfect amateur horse. What a horse, they say. He’s so kind, they say.

We laugh, his owner and me. If they only knew. If they had only seen him in process the first few years before we ever put in a public appearance. If they only knew how hard Peggy worked for years to make sense of him before I came along. Together we figured out how to help him rehabilitate his hidden physical issues - and saw an exponential improvement in his attitude.

If the judge who stood up and remarked on his dreamy canter only knew how I refused to ride his canter for almost two years, due to it’s rough and uncomfortable nature at the time. If they only knew how many times we have had to take a step back and go, ok, let’s think about this.

His process looked nothing like what they teach you in videos, books and magazines. It certainly looked nothing like the proud, (mostly) dignified and elegant product of patient and thoughtful training he is today. A lot of his process looked like nothing at all, and certainly not anything like the pictures on the cover of glossy magazines. Many training sessions were just plain messy, experimental. Just me asking him multiple choice questions and him throwing spaghetti at the wall in response. Sometimes, they looked and felt exactly like the twenty that went before.

Until, suddenly, one day, they didn’t. And both Franklin and I started having fun. And then, pretty soon, Peggy, did, too.

These rides weren’t pretty, not as in they were ugly, argumentative or violent, just very Plain Jane. Boring. Pictures and video are unimpressive. Just a big, ungainly horse in need of physical rehabilitation, lumping around in varying degrees of poor coordination, accompanied by a couple of dedicated people with bright ideas and a truck-load of patience.

I often thought that had somebody been watching me with no prior knowledge of the situation, they would have thought me a fool and Franklin a non-starter, and I still wonder sometimes that Peggy kept her faith in either of us. But she did, and we all soldiered on.

A few times, we’ve thought ourselves at a dead end. We’d gaze and gaze at the map, but in the end it has always been the territory, Franklin himself, who informed the next step on the journey. The dream of the destination, a happy, healthy horse (fit for the cover of a glossy magazine!) has pulled us along all the way, but truth told, many times the challenges of the journey itself have been close to derailing us altogether. Had anyone asked me six years ago, I would’ve told them I had no idea what he might or might not, become.

I still don’t. And that’s ok. Because where he is now, is already beautiful, and more than I had ever hoped for at the outset. It is definitely sweeter for all the difficulties we have overcome to get this far. The process itself, while looking nothing like the desired, and thus far achieved, product, has been extraordinary, educational and sometimes, flat out miraculous.  

Looking back at the territory of Franklin is like looking back at the territory of my life. In a sense, we are handed a map at birth, and grow up being told this is what the world looks like, this is what life is, this is what it means. But for many of us, the territory turns out to be so very different than it looked on the map. It can be for the better, or it can be for worse, but either way, we’ll never know what’s at the other end unless we keep going when the going gets tough.

For the record, I hope you have a Peggy along for the ride, someone who will never, ever give up.

*Nick Vujicic:

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.