Timing

“There’s just a feel thing, and it’s hard to describe. It’s how you relate to the world and the things in it. Some people are remarkably gifted at learning languages. Some people are polymaths and teach themselves calculus.

Some people are remarkably good with horses on the ground/on their back. Go to any racetrack in the world, and go ask who the best groom in the barn is … every groom will know exactly who it is, and all their horses will be dangerous shitheads to everyone else and magically ok with said person, who probably has never actually sat on a horse and probably doesn’t speak good English … They just speak horse.

The one trait that I have noticed time and again with animals and people who are good with them is almost a dissociated  personality. “Ok. I have a problem. That’s interesting. Let’s see how I solve it.” Instead of “Oh shit, problem, big problem, now I’m tense and I’m gonna make the problem worse.” I think good riders relax into problems instead of tense into them, and with a fight/flight animal like horses, cooler heads will prevail.

It takes a unique person to be in the middle of a situation that’s going wrong – misbehaving horse, knowing you’re about to fall, whatever – and think, not tense. But the good riders do that. 

The most complex, complicated and difficult things that good riders do, they do when they are the most relaxed. You don’t force a thing that weighs more than you do to do anything. You convince it that you both have the same idea at the same time.

I could be Rocky Balboa and I’m not going to fight a horse into submission without serious harm to one of us. But a 90 lb woman can take the same horse and make it a saint by figuring out how to work with it.

The last thing is a complete willingness to have strong opinions held loosely. I need to know what I want to do, and how I want to do it. And I need to be willing to absolutely totally and completely drop any method that doesn’t  work for my partner. Riding is finding those lines – how far can we both have fun pushing limits, without either of us crossing them? Good riders find lines, bad ones cross them.”