As of April 1st, it has officially been five years since I bought Bones. I can’t believe the time has flown by so fast! To commemorate the occasion, here are five life lessons I’ve learned from five years with a beautiful, stubborn, sweet horse at my side.
No matter how much you love something, it will disappoint you. Love it fiercely anyway. This applies to everything in life, but nothing illustrates it quite like owning a horse. Sometimes you show up to the barn, happy, excited, ready to commune with your horse and have a great day, and your horse is just not having it. Sometimes you just can’t seem to connect. You want to go right and he wants to go left. You want to have a nice easy ride and he wants to spook at that one particular corner every single time you pass it. Or you’re riding in a show and instead of kicking ass like you did at the previous one, you find yourself with your ass in the dirt in front of a bunch of strangers. You know how talented your horse is, and how hard you worked to prepare, but it feels like it was all for nothing. Nobody is perfect, and horses are certainly included in that. But if you love to ride and you love your horse, the disappointment is worth it for those days where everything just clicks. When you’re flying over a jump course perfectly in sync, or you’re teaching your horse a new dressage movement and he just gets it. It’s worth it for those moments of connection and success and ease.
Love is hard work sometimes. Sometimes it’s easy and it just flows, but sometimes you really have to make an effort and choose to love. Sometimes you show up to the barn to find a horse with one lame foot, swollen to high heaven, and instead of a nice pleasant ride in good weather, you’re stuck trying to hose down your horse’s leg (the horse equivalent of icing it) against his will. You’re hot, sweaty, and fighting to keep the hose water running in the right place while you keep all of your body parts in one piece. It’s not always pretty. It’s not always fun. Sometimes it’s -20 degrees outside and snow is blowing in your face and you have 32 horses that need to be fed. Or you fell off your last ride and you’re still a little sore (bodily and mentally). In those moments, you choose to love your horse. It doesn’t come easy but it makes you better and it teaches him that he can trust you to love him and to come back even when he isn’t at his best.
If you put your mind to something, if you really want it and will sacrifice to get it, you really can make it happen. A horse is not cheap to acquire, and it’s even more expensive to keep. When I found out Bones was for sale, I initially thought, “No way.” But I knew he was supposed to be mine. We just connected and I knew I had to try. So I crunched the numbers. And then I crunched them again. And then I called like four people that I trusted and asked them if I had completely lost my mind. Somehow, none of them thought I had, and I found a way to make the money math work, so I went for it. I bought my dream horse. In the five years since, I’ve probably spent about $50,000 on him if I’m honest with myself. Between board costs, the farrier, the vet when the inevitable accident happens, equipment, and of course, lots of Twizzlers, it really adds up. And that doesn’t even count the cost of gas to get out to see him. But it works because he’s worth it to me. It’s worth giving up eating out and going out frequently. It’s worth skipping concerts that sound like they might be fun. It’s worth driving an older car and spending less on a car payment and insurance. But I had to really decide to make it happen, or it wouldn’t work.
It’s okay to feel fear. It’s natural. Fear is always in the forefront of a horse’s brain as a prey species. But you can teach a horse to respond well to fear (most of the time). And you can teach yourself as well. It’s how you handle fear that defines you. If you push yourself, but cautiously, your fear will help keep you safe, but it won’t stop you from improving and getting where you want to go. Bones may be afraid of the color purple (yes, seriously), but he’s learned to sail right over a purple-painted jump because he won’t let it stand in the way of his running back toward home. Feel the fear and do it anyway.
If you don’t put in the work to reach your goal, you’ll never see progress. When I first bought Bones, he needed a lot of muscle development and a small attitude adjustment. Neither of those things is something you can make happen overnight. I was at the barn six day as a week, working to help him build his topline (back muscles) and his neck. Six days a week I was learning when my method of communication was the reason he wasn’t getting the message and how to correct myself and when he was just being stubborn and he was the one who needed to be corrected. But after a year and a half or so, we were jumping taller courses than I had ever done before. We jumped a 3’3” tall oxer that was wider than me and that honestly freaked me out when I looked at it. But we had built trust and communication and our muscles, and our preparation made use better and it made us ready. These days I’m not out as frequently and I’ve posted before about my related mental block, but deep down, I know that if and when I can get back down to business 5 or six days a week, we’ll figure it out again, because we did before, and hard work is never unrewarded. You don’t always find the reward you seek, but sometimes the one you receive instead is even better.
