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Over the fences
Jan. 10th, 2011 04:54 pmMy daughter and I began taking riding lessons in June 2009. We'd gone on a trail ride, and she loved it and wanted more. "We weren't really riding," she said, "the horses were just following each other and we were sitting on them. I want to learn how to ride."
I had always found horses intimidating. They're huge, after all, with large mouths and chompy teeth and if they step on your foot they can break all your foot-bones, and their backs are high off the ground and they have no seat belts. I've never been athletic in the least. In the years when I was forced to take gym class, it was all humiliation and torment, and once it was no longer required, I pretty much avoided regular exercise for over twenty years. I did start going to the gym in my 40s, but I've never done anything you could call a sport.
And yet, I found myself loving the challenge of learning to ride, using my entire body to communicate with another species. Riding a horse exercises muscles I'd never worked before, and demanded a level of concentration and coordination that was difficult for me. It takes me out of my endless jumble of thoughts and focuses all my attention on my body: Are my heels down? Is my back straight? Are my hands too high? Can I slow down this trot? You begin with walking, learning very specific style of posture and balance and position. Next is trotting, which has a bouncy rhythm, and posting, which involves coordinating your body's own movements with the trot so you're not bouncing up and down and bruising bits of yourself you really don't want to bruise. The next step is cantering, which is a 1-2-3, 1-2-3 rhythm of hoofbeats, and fast.
My daughter learned far faster than I did, with the flexibility of youth, and I struggled to make my body remember and perform tasks that my brain understood far better than my muscles did. There were moments when I thought, I'm just too old to learn this. I came home aching, took long hot baths, and ached even more the next day. All the same I loved it, and I grew to love the horses too; Nugget, the first horse I rode, and Heidi, who likes to go fast, and who will nudge you with her head like a cat as you're taking her back to her stall, and Nero, who is gray and has a long soft coat that makes him feel like a plush toy. I learned how to tack up, the complexities of bridles and saddles and making sure your girth is tight enough and your stirrups are the right length. The smell of leather, the various buckles and blankets, and the right way to hold a carrot or half an apple so the horse can gather it up without taking a finger with it.
But learning to ride had a deeper meaning for me. It was about trying new things, even if they intimidated me. It was about taking risks, doing something that held some degree of danger. It was about proving to myself that I was not too old, too out-of-shape, or too uncoordinated to learn a new skill. It was about stretching myself physically and emotionally, going beyond what I had thought were my limits.
You could call it a midlife crisis, except there was no sense of crisis about it, only a growing sense that my time was not unlimited, and that all I had was an undisclosed amount of future. I could regret not having done things, or I could do them. So I got on a horse.
Last Friday, I had my first riding lesson of the year, and I jumped for the first time. It was a small fence, maybe a foot off the ground, but a big deal. The best part was that my riding instructor didn't realize I hadn't jumped before, since my daughter started doing jumps months ago. So I didn't get a full explanation of what I needed to do before I went over the rail. It was terrifying, but I did it. Then we worked out the misunderstanding, along the lines of "Why weren't you holding the mane? You've done this before!" "NO, I haven't! That was my first jump!"
I got some further instruction, but words only reach the brain, and the body is much dumber, or at least mine seems to be. So the second and third jumps were not appreciably less terrifying than the first one. But I did them, and I did not fall off, and with practice, I will get better.
This year is a big one; I'm turning fifty in a few months. While it's only a year older than forty-nine, the half-century mark has a symbolic gravitas. A while back, I decided I'd get a tattoo when I turned fifty, if I could decide on an image I wanted to carry with me for the rest of my life. Sometime last year, I realized what my tattoo would be: a horse, jumping over a fence.
I had always found horses intimidating. They're huge, after all, with large mouths and chompy teeth and if they step on your foot they can break all your foot-bones, and their backs are high off the ground and they have no seat belts. I've never been athletic in the least. In the years when I was forced to take gym class, it was all humiliation and torment, and once it was no longer required, I pretty much avoided regular exercise for over twenty years. I did start going to the gym in my 40s, but I've never done anything you could call a sport.
And yet, I found myself loving the challenge of learning to ride, using my entire body to communicate with another species. Riding a horse exercises muscles I'd never worked before, and demanded a level of concentration and coordination that was difficult for me. It takes me out of my endless jumble of thoughts and focuses all my attention on my body: Are my heels down? Is my back straight? Are my hands too high? Can I slow down this trot? You begin with walking, learning very specific style of posture and balance and position. Next is trotting, which has a bouncy rhythm, and posting, which involves coordinating your body's own movements with the trot so you're not bouncing up and down and bruising bits of yourself you really don't want to bruise. The next step is cantering, which is a 1-2-3, 1-2-3 rhythm of hoofbeats, and fast.
My daughter learned far faster than I did, with the flexibility of youth, and I struggled to make my body remember and perform tasks that my brain understood far better than my muscles did. There were moments when I thought, I'm just too old to learn this. I came home aching, took long hot baths, and ached even more the next day. All the same I loved it, and I grew to love the horses too; Nugget, the first horse I rode, and Heidi, who likes to go fast, and who will nudge you with her head like a cat as you're taking her back to her stall, and Nero, who is gray and has a long soft coat that makes him feel like a plush toy. I learned how to tack up, the complexities of bridles and saddles and making sure your girth is tight enough and your stirrups are the right length. The smell of leather, the various buckles and blankets, and the right way to hold a carrot or half an apple so the horse can gather it up without taking a finger with it.
But learning to ride had a deeper meaning for me. It was about trying new things, even if they intimidated me. It was about taking risks, doing something that held some degree of danger. It was about proving to myself that I was not too old, too out-of-shape, or too uncoordinated to learn a new skill. It was about stretching myself physically and emotionally, going beyond what I had thought were my limits.
You could call it a midlife crisis, except there was no sense of crisis about it, only a growing sense that my time was not unlimited, and that all I had was an undisclosed amount of future. I could regret not having done things, or I could do them. So I got on a horse.
Last Friday, I had my first riding lesson of the year, and I jumped for the first time. It was a small fence, maybe a foot off the ground, but a big deal. The best part was that my riding instructor didn't realize I hadn't jumped before, since my daughter started doing jumps months ago. So I didn't get a full explanation of what I needed to do before I went over the rail. It was terrifying, but I did it. Then we worked out the misunderstanding, along the lines of "Why weren't you holding the mane? You've done this before!" "NO, I haven't! That was my first jump!"
I got some further instruction, but words only reach the brain, and the body is much dumber, or at least mine seems to be. So the second and third jumps were not appreciably less terrifying than the first one. But I did them, and I did not fall off, and with practice, I will get better.
This year is a big one; I'm turning fifty in a few months. While it's only a year older than forty-nine, the half-century mark has a symbolic gravitas. A while back, I decided I'd get a tattoo when I turned fifty, if I could decide on an image I wanted to carry with me for the rest of my life. Sometime last year, I realized what my tattoo would be: a horse, jumping over a fence.
