About a year ago, a collection of circumstances allowed me to learn to really ride horses.
I’d spent time on a horse before, but this was an opportunity to really learn how to handle one, how to ride rather than jus’ sittin’ up there.
As someone far more comfortable with things mechanical, it represented a challenge, especially at this point in my life. After fifty some years on the planet, I was faced with learning how to interact with a creature with whom I couldn’t communicate and that had a mind of its own.
And, just to make the experience completely weird, one of the first things I learned was that horses don’t learn the same way people do.
It seems horses learn with one side of their brain at a time, meaning that if you teach them to turn right, they won’t automatically figure out how to turn left … they have to be taught that separately.
Horse trainers spend literally years insuring that horses learn the proper things in the proper ways, with the right cues, and in balance.
They work the right side of the animals brain equally with the left side, trying always to keep the training in balance. Unbalanced training results in a horse that favors one action over another, and one that doesn’t respond properly to the riders cues.
A new rider must first learn how to sit in the saddle, how to position the hands and the feet, again with an eye to maintaining balance. Balance keeps the rider in the saddle instead of on the ground, pretty much regardless of what the horse may decide to do.
Then the rider must learn the subtle cues that will direct the horse to do what the rider desires. How a rider moves in the saddle, where a rider moves his hands, how a rider holds his feet all give subtle signals to the horse that connect to the horses training.
If the rider doesn’t initiate the proper cues, the horse won’t respond the way the rider wants, regardless of how well the horse has been trained. If the horse hasn’t been well trained, it won’t respond properly to the rider, no matter how expertly the cues are applied.
A well trained horse and a well trained rider are only two thirds of the equation. The final third is the balance that comes between the horses training and the riders training … that point where each knows what the other intends, and the likely response.
How balanced is your life? How well balanced are the people important to you? And how’s the balance between the two?
Could a bit of horse sense improve things?
"In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.” --- Albert Einstein
