Riding is my best mood enhancer. Me on Diamond’s Daylight, last summer.
Riding is the best therapy that I can think of (albeit not the cheapest) for I can be in the worst mood and after only few minutes on a horse I feel like a different person.
I remember how I used to (and still do sometimes) get so uptight when I first began training. One day, upon hearing me complain for the umpteenth time about how “awful I was at this,” or ”well that didn’t go as planned,” or “when will I ever learn how to do this right,” my best riding buddy, Katrina, gently pointed out that there is no such thing as bad ‘horse time.’
Fast-forward to today.
I found myself, once again, hyper-focused on learning how to do “this” exactly right. In this case the “this” was a certain dressage technique. (Full disclosure, all dressage techniques, and dressage in general for that matter, are new to me.) The point is that when I was done with my lesson and ultimately stopped thinking for a moment, I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of sheer happiness. It took over my body, like some alien being and the magnitude of it was almost overwhelming. Without realizing it, I was not just smiling, I was beaming and a calm, peacefulness filled my soul.
Hmmm, I thought to myself, this is what it’s all about, not jumping a Prix, or having perfect form, or winning a competition, but the pure joy that comes from “horse time.”
So I finally get it; this is what my good friend was talking about. I must simply enjoy the time and everything else is, well, just details.
