(“Wait a minute! I can’t work in a place like this!”)

I was on a student’s horse for an hour’s training session, and as she passed by the arena, the owner remarked about the “argument” her horse was giving me. To me, that term connotes wincing spectators rushing to get the TD. Nothing the mare was doing was remotely on that order. My student’s reaction was mildly disheartening but provided, I hoped, the proverbial “teachable moment.” [Reference: Chapter 96 “Be the Decider” from DRESSAGE Unscrambled and the blogpost called Wavy Gravy]. The former explains the Hegel-inspired deKunffy analogy of the thesis/antithesis/synthesis—if your riding only re-states and reinforces the status quo, nothing ever changes! In the latter, Wavy Gravy, I described the cook’s need to stir his newly-made gravy before he serves it—finding and dispersing any lumps. If he doesn’t stir it, he won’t find them, but that hardly means they don’t exist. If he doesn’t look for them, eventually they (in this case the resistances) will end up on someone’s plate!

Regarding my student’s horse, I didn’t think I was arguing at all. I described the scene to her more as “rearranging the furniture.”
As you begin a schooling session on someone’s well trained horse, you’ll still usually find a few things not quite to your liking. Fine tuning the relationship is a bit like sitting down at a borrowed desk to do some writing. Before you begin, you automatically straighten the edges of a distracting stack of magazines in front of you, and you tuck a few scattered pens back in their jar.

A lot of horses start out a bit more disorganized, more “other directed,” than that. Then I might imagine a relief pitcher in a big game trotting in from the bullpen to get the last two outs. He fires his eight warm up throws to the catcher and then pauses. He sculpts the front of the mound with the toe of his spikes and digs just the right little comfortable depression into the base of the rubber to help his push off. Only then can he address the batter waiting at the plate. This is a relatively optimistic metaphor for many horses usually ridden by less experienced amateurs.

Realistically, it’s more common—as it was with this mare—to climb aboard and in the first moments react thusly: “Wait a minute! I can’t work in a place like this! I can’t see out the window. There’s no light. I gotta turn the desk around. I gotta move the couch. And turn that radio down!” Required under the circumstances: some heavy lifting and a degree of exertion. When the room’s contents must be adjusted like that, you don’t complain. You aren’t annoyed. You just put things where they need to be so you can get on with business.

Similarly, training can only take place when the horse’s mental furniture is arranged suitably. If a horse is dull to the leg, either moving forward or being asked to displace laterally, if he “answers” the leg by running through or against the hand, if his jaw and poll aren’t pliable and if the horse isn’t calm, attentive, and responsive, then riding around making ring figures is a waste of time. To attend to these items isn’t dwelling on minutiae, rather it is creating a hospitable working environment wherein all that transpires afterwards has a real likelihood of success.