Well earlier this week I was having some sad feelings, because even though I went to ride on Wednesday and had a good time, I was feeling very peripheral. That is, I don't own or lease any of the horses at the barn, and obviously, Pope owns Toby now, so I can't really even pretend he's "mine", and sometimes time on the horses feels very painfully borrowed, like I'm just sort of orbiting the barn's existence, and it's a lonely feeling.
So I was supposed to have a lesson Friday, and my instructor wasn't there (a note in the book said she would be, eventually), and I didn't want it to be too dark so I tacked Tobes up and was riding in the ring, still feeling sort of sad and peripheral. He was being a little bit of a butthead, not to frustration just - flicking his ears in that way he does when he isn't sure what I'm asking, so I know it's my fault and I have to try something else. My instructor showed up and I didn't notice at first, but she watched me for a while from outside the ring, so I got to show her some of the stuff I've tried with him on my own. That was nice. The shoulder-ins we did were not as nice as I think we've done before, but she said they weren't bad at all, considering he doesn't do them much and I'm still novice at the whole thing. (Naturally, things never go as well when someone is watching).
We ended up riding longer than usual, and longer than I thought we would, and I felt better about things. My instructor and I got to sit and talk, which we haven't gotten to. I came to an epiphany of sorts that's probably not a surprise to more experienced riders - we were talking about horses, and certain horses being too much, or just being different.
I was thinking that for riding horses, most of us are asking them for a fundamental set of the same things (forward, back, turn right, turn left, go faster, go slower, and variances from there), and there's a commonality in how we ask riding horses for these things (reins, body language), and it's like literally learning a language - and different animals require different levels of fluency in that language. It seemed analogous to practicing Russian with my hockey teammate: he's a native speaker, and knows me well enough that even if I was clumsy with phrasing and pronunciation, he'll understand me and respond in kind. Conversely, if I spoke with someone I didn't know, they might just give me a blank stare, or, they'd respond but at a level I couldn't keep up with. If I ask Toby for something in a clumsy way but it's at least vaguely familiar, he'll most often try and answer me with at least what he thinks I want (which is how we learned he can side-pass). But if I asked, say, Steel, or even Jasper, it'd be a different conversation, because I'm not fluent enough at this point in our lingua franca. I suppose looking at it this way might seem kind of "woo", but it helps me to think of it this way, because it connects back to learning from riding many horses - just like speaking a language, it increases fluency, and the ability to converse and connect.
