Are You Riding the Horse, or Your Idea of the Horse?

A letter on the ego of being right, and what your horse can teach you when you stop pretending to know.

I am almost embarrassed to tell you this story. If you have been riding for a while, a version of it has probably happened to you too. I am hoping you will be kind, and that those who witnessed it in real time have, by now, kindly forgotten.

It was a clinic. I was riding my homebred mare, Lili, surrounded by friends and a few onlookers. The clinician was someone who came to our area a few times a year, and I had ridden with him before. I was eager to show him that I had taught Lili the flying change. (The ego in that sentence is the subject of a future letter.)

The first few attempts did not go well. The clinician told me, patiently, that my timing was off. In my head, I knew I was right. So I kept doing the same thing. Lili did her best. Some changes came off. Some didn't. The clinician kept telling me about my timing, and I could hear the patience draining out of his voice. Finally, in frustration, I stopped, and I snapped something like, I am doing it. If it's so easy, show me.

He did not, kindly, get on the horse and show me up. What he said instead was that when I was giving the aid mattered more than I knew. I was asking a moment too late, and Lili did not have time to get her legs in the right place. Grudgingly, I let myself listen. He called out "now," and I gave the aid the instant he said it, and the change suddenly felt easier.

I want to write about the minutes between him first telling me my timing was off and when I finally gave in. I do not think those minutes are rare, and I do not think they are only mine.

The ego of being right

Adult amateurs are people who have earned what we know. We have read the books. We have taken the lessons. We have absorbed corrections, accumulated cues, and internalized principles. By the time we are riding at the level any of us is riding at, we have a real body of knowledge, and we are reasonably proud of it. We should be.

But knowledge has a side effect nobody warns us about. The more of it we have, the more we start to lead with it. We arrive at the barn with our theories already formed. We warm up and we are not really paying attention to what is actually happening under us. We are confirming what we already believed. The ride has, in some quiet way, already happened in our heads. And the actual ride, the one underneath us, has to fight to be noticed.

This is the trap of expertise in a sport where the situation changes every day. The horse is different today than they were yesterday. The weather is different. The footing is different. Our bodies are different. None of yesterday's conclusions are entirely valid today. But our knowledge does not know that. Our knowledge wants to be applied.

There is a tradition in Zen Buddhism that names this directly. They call the alternative shoshin, beginner's mind, and the way they describe it is precise. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few. Notice they are not saying the expert is wrong. They are saying the expert has narrowed prematurely. Curiosity has been replaced by conclusion, and the cost is that the expert can no longer see what the beginner would have seen.

This is the thing we do not want to admit about advanced riding. We become harder to teach as we become better at riding. Not because we are willful. Because we have more conclusions to defend.

What Tae actually said

Tae Erickson, who I quoted in an earlier letter about flow, has another sentence I think about regularly. What I thought I was doing, she said, was not always what was happening.

That is the gap that this whole letter is about. There is what we believe we are doing on the horse, and there is what is actually happening on the horse, and the gap between those two is large for almost everyone, almost all the time. It is large for Tae, who rides at a level most of the rest of us only dream about. It is generally even larger for us.

What is beautiful about her sentence is the verb tense. Not always. Not never. Not rarely. Just not always. She is naming it as a permanent condition of being a person inside a body trying to do a complicated thing. The gap is not pathology. The gap is the standard human condition in a sport like ours. You do not get rid of it. You get better at noticing when you are inside it.

And that noticing is what beginner's mind, in a saddle, actually is. It is not pretending you do not know things. You know things. You earned them. It is, instead, riding with the working assumption that the gap might be wider than you think today, that the horse might be saying something you are not currently positioned to hear, that your theory of the problem might be one moment off from the actual problem. It is holding your knowledge with an open mind instead of a closed one.

Where Martin comes back in

In the last letter I quoted Martin Kuhn saying the days he was not learning were days he was not listening. I want to take that one step further, because it applies here too. If listening is the open channel, then curiosity is the posture that keeps it open. You can be physically present in the saddle, breathing well, calm in your body, and still not be in beginner's mind, because the channel can be open and you can be using it to broadcast instead of receive. We do this constantly. We listen to the horse only long enough to find evidence for what we already concluded, and then we stop listening, and we ride our conclusion.

Curiosity is what makes the listening actually go in. Without it, presence is just a monologue with a softer voice.

Why this is so hard for us

Adult amateurs carry one additional weight that pro riders do not. We are riding partly to be the rider we think of ourselves as being. Our identity is tangled up in our competence. So when we are wrong about something, we are not just collecting a useful piece of information. We are also, at the same moment, taking a small hit to the story we tell about who we are.

This is the real reason for the snap I gave that clinician. It was not that I could not see the right answer. I had already heard it, multiple times, from someone who knew. It was that I did not want to be the rider whose timing had just been corrected, in front of her friends, in a clinic she had specifically wanted to ride well in, on a mare she had brought up herself. I rode for my ego instead of for Lili, and I knew I was doing it, and I did it anyway.

If you ride seriously and you have never done this, you are kinder to yourself than I am. I suspect, though, that what is actually true is that we all do it, and we mostly do not name it, and naming it is the beginning of doing it less.

How to ride with it

A few practical things have helped me, when I have remembered to use them.

Hold your theories as hypotheses, not verdicts. If you arrive at the barn convinced you know what is wrong, that is fine, but call it what it is. "I think it is the right hind, and I am going to test that." A hypothesis is something you can let go of when the evidence comes in. A verdict is something you have to defend.

Notice your flinch. When your trainer corrects you, or when your horse contradicts you, there is a half-second of resistance inside your chest before you actually take in the new information. That flinch is the data point. It is your ego telling you it does not want to lose the round. The flinch is not the enemy. Ignoring the flinch is the enemy. Notice it, name it to yourself ("there it is"), and then go ahead and take in the correction. The flinch will be there. You do not have to do what it wants.

Reframe being wrong. Being wrong is not a demotion. It is the moment you found out something you did not previously know, which is the entire reason you came to the barn in the first place. The cost of being wrong is small. The cost of insisting on being right is the rest of the ride.

Let your horse and your trainer surprise you. If you go in convinced you know what today's lesson will be about, you will not learn what today's lesson is actually about. Some of the best rides I have ever had began with my trainer saying something I was not expecting to hear. The ride got good the moment I stopped trying to steer it back to the topic I had arrived with.

And the bigger one. Notice when you have stopped being curious. The signal is usually internal. The internal monologue shifts from questions to declarations. What is going on with this canter becomes I know what is going on with this canter. The shift is the warning. Curiosity is questions. Conclusions are the absence of them. If your inside voice has stopped asking, you have stopped riding the horse and started riding your idea of the horse.

The horse you have not met yet

The horse under you today is not the horse you rode last week. They are similar. The pattern matching you have done is mostly valid. But they are not the same horse, and you are not the same rider, and you have never ridden today's ride before. Beginner's mind is the recognition that this is true, and the willingness to act like it is true.

There is a freedom in this, if you can find it. The freedom is not having to know in advance. The freedom is being allowed to find out. The freedom is sitting on top of a thousand-pound animal who is, in some small way, new to you today, and being curious about who that animal is and what they have to teach. And then receiving it. And not riding for your conclusion.

I have spent more rides than I would like to admit defending positions that the horse was patiently trying to talk me out of. I have one ambition for the rides ahead of me. To put down the conclusion sooner. To stay in the question longer. To let the horse, and the trainer, and the day, surprise me.