What My Horses Have Taught Me

When I woke up this morning, the sun was shining, the snow was melting, and the bird were singing - and I, like most equestrians, thought, what a wonderful morning for a ride. With spring upon us, sunny skies and warmer temperatures give us equestrians a renewed sense of excitement to spend time with our equine companions, despite the hassles of muddy yards and shedding horses. I got out of bed with more energy than I do on any given day and readied myself for the barn.


As I settled into the somewhat monotonous, yet therapeutic, pattern of getting ready for a ride - brush the horse, wrap the legs, straighten the saddle pad, tighten the girth - my mind began to wander, as it often does. I started to think about me, and horses, and how they fit into my life. Horses have been in my life for, literally, as long as I can remember, my parents having bought my first horse, Hal, when I was only a year old. I thought about how he was my brother and my best friend and my confidant as a child when I had no one else to turn to, long before I even realized what he was to me. I thought about all the coaching I'd had, before I started riding him and after, about all the barns I'd been to and all the people I'd met because of him. I thought about the many life lessons riding and horse ownership taught me as a child - lessons in responsibility and trust, love and heartbreak, success and failure. I thought about how my horse was there for me, too, when I learned all of those lessons again, outside of the context of horses. I know that I would not be even remotely the same person that I am today if I had grown up without him.


With all of these thoughts in my mind, I lead my tacked-up horse to the arena. This horse is not my childhood horse, but my second horse, my first adulthood horse. This horse is young, uneducated, and inexperienced, save for what I've managed to impart on him in our nearly two years together. This is the horse who taught me, as an adult, how to be brave enough to take chances, yet also to have faith in something that I know to be right. This is the horse that accompanied me, in the hardest decision of my young life, across the country, 4000 kilometers away from anyone and everything else I knew and loved. And he is absolutely the reason I make it through my toughest days because I promised him that I would always come back.


Working him today, I reminisced about how far we've come, and dreamed about how far we could go. Every equestrian has big dreams. But we, like the vast majority of equestrians, know these dreams are likely never to become more than that. Life stands in the way. I don't have the resources to make more of it than that, at least not right now or in the foreseeable future, and any edge Charlie's pedigree might have given him became worthless the moment he stepped onto that stockyard. I know that we are not Valegro and Charlotte, or Hickstead and Eric. We are not at the top of our country, our province, our region, or even of our barn. And that is just fine. We are just Charlie and Alexandria, and we strive to be the best that Charlie and Alexandria can be. Together, we may lack many of the necessities that make a champion, but we have heart - and I could probably argue that we have a lot more heart than most. And I am happy to be the champion of that category, even if just in my mind.


Every horseman knows the proverb, "For every rider there is one horse, and for every horse there is one rider". For me, though, that simply isn't true. Hal was that horse for me for the first 21 years of my life. And now, as life goes, I am striving for different things, and Charlie has become that horse for me for, I hope, the next 21 years. It hasn't been, I realized today, so much incorporating horses into my life, but two very special horses incorporating me into theirs. And I am so much the better for it.