There have been a few recent posts on blogger about regrets in riding and all things horse. I could do a post on its own of all the things I have missed out on, watched slip by, have never quite reached or even gotten a chance at doing when it comes to this subject but the list would be long and that would just suck for plenty of reasons.
I will list two that a lot of others can relate to- my parents refused to buy me a pony and lessons were 'too expensive'. I can blame my parents and wave the flag- 'My childhood sucked', but it won't change anything. Since then life has handed me a whole bunch of lemons over the years so I've made a whopping batch of margaritas and let all of the disappointments go. Screw that and screw them.
Of the many things I Have gotten to do with horses, there have been times when I have doubted myself, questioned my own ideas and times when I said "Fuck it!", jumped in blindly and hoped for the best. Both have their pro's and cons. With this whole year having been a clusterf*ck, I have appreciated my time with the ponies and just being around them, even if it is just to turn them out and clean stalls.
One thing that I have noticed in showing- people fixate on one thing or another and work long and hard at solving why they can't get this movement or that one perfect. I would love to ride or drive a perfect dressage test and nail every movement but yeah, that's just not gonna happen any time soon! Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Kat and I could do ok in dressage and then kill it in the games classes, cones and obstacles. We function better with speed and not having to think about stuff. Just point and shoot, rip around the course with reckless abandon, just throw down fast times and often double clear rounds. It's what we do. Other people have some really nice dressage scores but then just don't open up the throttle on the cones, hazards or games classes. That's how they roll and that's ok.
For ridden dressage- the last pony I was working with, we did ok. We were in the ribbons every time out, got a couple of 2nd place scores at one show, tried Western Dressage & scored an 8 for our halt and overall I felt we did pretty well considering. A friend of mine commented that the judge seemed to like the pony but not my style of riding.
That's what we all face when showing. We aren't all going to nail every transition, every movement, every spin, every slide, every stride between jumps, every barrel pattern, every part of everything on every ride. We also aren't going to Wow! every judge either. We're human- they're human we all have good days and bad, things we like and don't and that's just that. When we struggle with transitions or half halts, making nice round circles instead of egg shapes or ice cream cones, we need to be able to chalk it up as "not our strong suit today" and move on.
Focus on other things for a while, try things on the test for the next level up. Maybe go back to something more basic for a refresher. Work on straightness, touch on balance in the stop, try some counterbending- and sometimes things will click for us or the horse. Now they understand what you're asking for. Now we have a better idea of more clear aids to use and when to give them. Maybe now we understand the why behind the previous movement and how it leads us into the next one. Now it all happens so effortlessly... Or it doesn't and it's just one of those things.
But at least now we know that this horse and I struggle with this- _________. In our test we will do it and not worry about it being perfect. We will just gloss over it and move on without making a fuss. And a lot of times we think it is more of an issue than others including the judge and our score is better than expected. We move on to the other movements we know we can nail and those scores make up the difference for the parts we worry and stress over.
Sometimes it is our worry and concern over this transition that makes it an issue. We get so tangled up in our own heads that we start doing things to make our horses react with WTF?!?! So when we ride thru it on our dressage test like it's no big deal- the horse agrees and executes it just like that. Which makes us scratch our heads and ask WTF?!?! too.
As far as regrets- they are personal to each of us. We can view them like we do our horses when we saddle up to ride- what horse are you today? Are you going to do everything I ask or fight me the whole time? We can hold onto our regrets and let them cloud our outlook or let them go and move on. When we let them go and move on, later we might look back and ask ourselves- Why didn't I do this sooner????
