Blog
In which the horse and I fool around together
Why is it that the one time I don’t copy my post before I hit submit (in case my control panel arbitrarily decides I’ve been idle too long and decides to make me log in again instead of posting the post), my control panel arbitrarily decides… look, you’re not going to make me type out that whole parenthetical statement again, are you?
It was a lovely post, but now it’s gone.
The gist of it:
While I love lessons, and they are invaluable, sometimes I really miss the chance to just ride. Me and the horse. And, sure, sometimes we’ll make mistakes. And sometimes, when I go to correct the mistakes, I’ll make them worse. But you keep trying until you make them better, right? And when you’re done, there’s a certain satisfaction in having worked through it on your own, even if it did take longer than it would have taken in a lesson.
Well, when I’m done. I shouldn’t speak for “you.” It’s this weird habit I have—I say “you” when I mean “I”. For that matter, I say “we” when I mean “I” too. The latter can be credited to my secret desire to the be Queen of Halt Near X-dom, and the former comes from years of poetry workshops, where any poem with “I” in it got the kiss of narcissistic death, but any poem with “you” in it was a brilliant attempt to bridge the gap between author and reader. Or something like that. I think my workshops eventually figured out “you” meant “I,” but they were too polite to mention it. Deep down, I’m horribly narcissistic. It’s why I blog. Wait… am I supposed to admit things like that? In public, I mean?
Anyway. My lesson this week turned into, in effect, an open ride for me—my instructor and I discussed the exercise I was going to work on, and then she let me work on it without any comments from her. It was really nice; I’d sort of forgotten how enjoyable it can be to concentrate on just the horse and the exercise, without keeping half an ear out for the instructor’s comments. And there’s a little more room to play—like permission to make mistakes—where I can keep trying slightly different things to see what effect they have on the exercise. It’s a different sort of learning process than what happens in an actual lesson, but it’s one I really miss. It was a good ride—by the end, I “got” what I needed to do in order to do the exercise correctly, and I got there on my own. Well, not on my own—with plenty of feedback from the horse. We got there together, which is how it should be, really.
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