Today I picked up a pen. Ok, so it’s 2021 – I sat down in front of a keyboard, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story, right?
I used to use a pen, a lot. I wrote poems, I wrote stories, I wrote songs and journal entries, even a couple of small books. Somewhere along the line, I just stopped. I can’t pinpoint the time it happened, or why – it just did. I used to write to express how I was feeling, what I was thinking, it was just a way to empty my head of the racing thoughts. It never occurred to me that with the decline in writing, came an increase in anxiety and crippling overthinking, but the correlation is undeniable. Writing was my outlet, where I could spill over the extra thoughts and creativity and get it on to paper and out in the world.
The world, especially right now, is a crazy place at times. The last eighteen months have been surreal for me on so many levels and I feel like I’ve been in an emotional wringer. From the devastating bushfires, to the height of cruel and heartless drought, to the giant hailstones and of course the collective trauma of the pandemic, nothing has been an easy ride. However, the more I sit with this, the more I realise it’s not just 2020/2021 for me, I find year after year challenging in some way. Our incredibly busy and hectic schedules leave no room for peace, no room to just be. I feel like my children have grown at the speed of light in front of my eyes, I thought I had more time to do things with them and next thing I know they are too grown up. There are times I just want it all to slow down!
I know I’m not alone feeling like this, so many of us do - but we just keep swirling around in this crazy vortex of ‘busy’, like it’s some sort of badge of honour to live a life so sped up, that we hardly get time to breathe. I feel like it literally steals my air until I have none left for me, my lungs heavy. When I wake each morning it’s with a surge of adrenaline until I can run through what lies ahead for the day and get my head around what needs to be done, where I need to be and at what times. It feels like survival, not living.
How do we change it? I don’t know – I don’t even pretend to have any answers to that - I’m a horsemanship coach, that’s what I do. I work with horses and people, helping them on their journey together. But my horses? Well, they sit in my paddocks looking very pretty a lot of the time, but not really doing much with me. So I started to think about why that is. Sure, it’s easy to say ‘I just don’t have time’ but the reality is that sometimes I spend more time scrolling my phone in a day than it would take to keep two horses in full time work, it’s not about time. It’s about headspace.
If there is one creature that can’t live on that crazy schedule I mentioned above, it’s the horse. Pure ‘in the moment’ beings, they simply cannot live by our clocks (unless of course you’re late with their food!). They don’t understand the concept of us only having a quick hour to spare between arriving home from work and starting dinner, to spend with them. They don’t have the cognitive ability to understand that we are a little stretched, a little burnt out and we aren’t 100% on our game. They just know we don’t feel right, don’t feel present. Their sensitivity to our energy means that if we go in a little wired, we are likely to get the same in return. And that can just keep on compounding…..
So one rushed night, we have a not so great ride. Common sense tells us that’s bound to happen from time to time, but our nervous system stores the feeling for later. Not all that helpful, but it’s a primal fear response that is there to keep us safe, so it’s hard to stop it. But that’s ok, we aren’t a nervous rider, just had an off day, so we try again tomorrow and you guessed it, tomorrow isn’t great either. So now we’re starting to repeat feeling worried/scared/angry around our horse and trust me, they feel it.
So now that fear response is doing this really cool thing where it has stored the feeling enough times during riding the horse, that we are now developing a strong connection between being near the horse and feeling fear. The anxiety has started before we are even on, sometimes even before we’ve caught the horse. This is where I will commonly hear the story ‘I don’t know what has happened, I didn’t fall or anything, he hasn’t put a foot wrong, but I’ve totally lost my confidence’. How do I know this story so well? Because I’ve lived it. The cumulative anxiety from living a hectic day to day life, snowballed into a complete inability to ride. I had tipped over into total survival mode and my mind isn’t going to let me jump onto a large animal with a mind of it’s own, when it’s in survival mode. The idea of riding became so foreign to me, it got packed away as something I used to do, bemoaning my lack of time as the reason I now wasn’t. I had days that I wondered if I still knew how.
So where do we start coming back from this? It’s complex and has many layers, but the first question I ask people, when they say to me they don’t know if they want to keep trying with their horse or if they should give up or sell, is simply – why do you have horses? They will often feel on the spot and I say, it’s ok – I don’t need the answer right now, I just want you to start thinking about it. To me, that is the first step to walking the road back to where you thought your dreams would take you, before the first obstacles began to appear in your path. There are so many good programs available now and the equestrian world is full of really talented and passionate people, wanting nothing more than to support you and your horse. However, something that none of them can do, is explore your reasons why you have a horse and answer it with the same deep honesty that you can. From here, you have a starting point - a common and simple answer is that we have a horse because we really love horses! So if we love them enough to keep us going, the next part is to work out if you really love and click with the one you have and so on, working our way systematically into a plan forward when we are a little lost, when day to day life and all its pressures have taken up the all the headspace we have available. The journey of horsemanship is never complete, it’s never about the destination, but the process along the way. The ups and downs, ins and outs. Like any grand obsession, you can have a day feeling totally elated, followed by one where you couldn’t have been dumped on your butt in rock bottom any harder if you tried (sometimes literally!). That is no easy ride to stick with, especially if you've lost sight of why you started in the first place.
One of the most useful pieces of advice I’ve ever been given ,was to start viewing myself as a student and extend myself the same support I would a client, so I asked myself - why do you have horses? I don’t remember life without horses, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it. Whether they were actually in my life in literal form, or in my dreams and alive in posters on my wall, they have always been there. From the first moment I heard the sound of shod hooves trotting down my street, in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne, I was captivated. Smokey was his name, a Clydesdale that used to pull a cart that delivered our milk. Trucks replaced him not long later, but despite being so young, I can still hear the sound, the memory is so strong.
My family have always been riders. My great great grandfather’s epitaph reads that he died after being kicked in the stomach by his horse. Not sure it’s the most romantic link to a history of horsemen in the family, but that’s the story! When I was 12, I learned to ride over the Christmas break. In those six weeks I lived a dream, daily visits to the horse paddocks and most days, a ride as well. My aunt was tough, I was on the lunge bareback or no stirrups until I could walk, trot and canter. Only then, was I allowed the reins. Even if I didn’t get to ride I would just as happily mix the feeds, I can still smell the salt and molasses. I also remember the smell of the tack shed at the back of my grandmother’s house. The horses were kept in a paddock by the airport down the road, but most of the gear was in a tiny white shed out the side door. A mix of old leather, horse hair and musty earth, the kind of thing that old saddles smell like, it will always take me back to a place of complete happiness, because it meant horses.
I spent my childhood collecting a UK based magazine named Horse Sense. Every month you were introduced to a new breed, collected a poster for your wall and learned something about riding, grooming or feeding. I could probably still rattle off a heap of facts about a Fell pony or a Belgian Draught. Whenever we would go for long drives, I would stare out my window and pretend I was on a horse and I was galloping across whatever terrain we passed, I would jump the fences and logs and splash through the creeks. While waiting for a horse of my own, I tried to teach our German Shepherd to lunge. There wasn’t anything in my life that I wouldn’t relate back to horses in some way. My grandmother bought me a saddle one Christmas, before I even had a horse and I would use leather cream on it, softening it, getting it ready for the day I would finally use it. The idea that it might not fit, or it might not be the right style or brand didn’t matter a damn, it was my saddle and it was my most prized possession!
That is what it’s like to have ‘the bug’ as they call it. And that’s why I still have horses…..because somewhere, underneath all of the weight of adulthood and it’s incessant demanding that we be somewhere or someone else all the time, is that little girl – completely and utterly obsessed and in love with horses.
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