You can stare at the crocuses watching for them to pop, but if you begin your vigil around Boxing Day, by and large you’ll have a long and boring wait. That said, as you train your horse, there are many occasions where you need to wait—a breath, a moment, even a seeming eternity—before you can proceed toward whatever your immediate goal is.

Horses need to assimilate. Right at the base of the Training Scale along with rhythm is relaxation. That’s not a limp, somnambulant state. It is the self possessed, undistracted focus which allows efficient, unhampered motion in the horse’s (and rider’s) bodies.

How hard it is to know when to push for more—not just for more energy on a circle or in a Medium trot but in the larger sense of “more”: whether to introduce a harder movement, whether to move up to a more challenging level in the show ring. These are but a few examples of where the wrong decision can set you back a long way.

Not everything needs to be done with complete relaxation. There will be moments when approaching the boiling point with horses of a certain temperament is a tactic to help you break through to a new, more complete understanding. But be careful what you wish for! Any time you skate near the precipice where trust ends, you risk not getting back from the edge intact.

I’ve written about the law of Unintended Consequences before. A little bit of repetition to encourage your horse to figure out the transition (for instance)—but practice your canter to walk too many times, and you’ll end up walking when you’re supposed to come from collected canter to collected trot near the end of I-1. It gets more pronounced when your horse wants to pop the other lead whenever you come on the diagonal to trot at X or to offer you a flying change every time you half pass from the center-line to the track. Yes, that’s not supposed to happen if your horse is totally on the aids, but like those bucket-carrying brooms in Fantasia, once you get something started, if you aren’t careful, it can be really hard to get it stopped!

I encourage a degree of risk-taking in my students. I prefer some “daring to excel” more than benign complacency as they interact with their horses, but you always have to step back and monitor how the whole thing is going down and avoid plugging into a course of action which can run away to an undesirable conclusion if left unattended too long. You ride them. They don’t ride you.