What I love about horses

My mom insisted my brothers and I take some sort of music lessons. Good for the brain, I think. Less good: my actual talent. Let’s just say at the end of the one piano recital I went to, a kind old lady walked up to me, patted me on the head, and said, “Well, dear. I have to say, I’ve never heard Bach’s Minuet in G played quite like that before.”

This was a whole lot better than what I deserved, which was “What song were you playing again, in what key, and at what tempo?”

I’m sure I learned something from playing piano, if only that I shouldn’t play piano.

But horses—horses. I’m sure we’ve all seen this sort of scene before:

A beginner rider’s horse gets away from her and gallops around the arena, throwing in some bucks for fun. The horse is caught and a more experienced rider gets on and schools her, just to make sure the horse will behave for the beginner.

The beginner, with her instructor’s encouragement, finally mounts the horse, although you can tell she’d rather not. The mare obviously looks like a fire-breathing dragon to her at this point.

You can also tell, once she’s on the mare, that she’s as tense as an overstretched rubber band and she is going to fall off soon if she doesn’t start breathing.

But the horse is an old schoolie who knows her job, has had her fun, and is just ambling along, with periodic looks at the instructor as if to say “This rider clearly doesn’t want to ride, so can’t we just go back to the barn now?”

And then you watch the instructor asking the rider to stop sitting there and start riding—do this exercise, do that exercise, turn here, turn there, leg yield, extend the walk, collect it, halt. You slowly see the color coming back in the rider’s face as she realizes she can do this, she’s done all this before, on this horse, and they’re going to be ok. As she relaxes, the horse listens better, and you see the rider register that, too.

The rider gets off with a grin on her face, because she rode that fire-breathing dragon and she lived to tell the tale. And not just that she sat there and survived—she took charge and they did stuff.

It’s very cool to watch, Having been the rider in that situation a time or two, it feels really good when it’s all over, too.

And it’s something I don’t think I ever would have experienced if I’d kept up with piano.