Can you feel the difference?
“Can you feel the difference?” When it comes to riding horses, everything revolves around feeling through your ‘aids’. My discipline is dressage, which is defined as, “the guiding of a horse through a series of complex maneuvers by slight movements if the rider’s hands, legs and weight.” When I’m having a lesson, my trainer teaches me different maneuvers by taking my horse and I through baby steps- starting out with something easy and familiar, then adding on until we master whatever movement we are trying to accomplish. All throughout a lesson, when I do something right, my trainer swells with glee, exclaiming, “Wow! Look at that! Do you feel the difference?!” Usually, I tell her that yeah, I can tell. Unfortunately, I normally can’t. I’m not calling my trainer a liar; I just don’t feel some catastrophic difference that she apparently sees. Sure, there may be a slight difference of the pressure in my reins, but otherwise, it seems the same. The difference, to me, is in the final product. When I finally have control of his shoulders, or he finally goes through his back properly- that’s when it hits me.
In life, a lot of things tend to act out that way- not noticing something has changed until it’s over with. Kind of like working on a jig saw puzzle, just looking for the little parts that need filling, not realizing how much of the bigger picture you have created in the process. Or how you meet someone freshmen year, and becoming friends. Friends who gradually become closer. Close enough that you are dating two years later. Or being in AP English and not realizing the difference in your writing style until you read over your research paper and impress yourself. You don’t notice the small changes until you look at the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures, then it’s like a game from the newspaper, circling the differences.
Dressage is often compared to ‘dancing with horses’. After all, that’s pretty much what it is, dancing. Dressage to music, if done correctly, really does look like dancing- the horse and rider moving together with the beat, the horse pushing so strongly with his/her hind legs and thrusting forward fluidly. Dressage is one of the most beautiful creative outlets- horse and rider gliding across the surface of the arena- having the look of utter concentration on both of their faces. Sometimes a mistake is made, a small fumble that the pair gets marked down for, but they continue the same with their test and their movements. Life is like that too, just because you do something wrong or what you want doesn’t go as planned, doesn’t mean that you should quit. Act like you meant to do that, smile at the judges, and continue on. Don’t worry about the big picture just yet, the more you pay attention to the minute details the better it will look in the end, for the more small details you pass over, the bigger chunks of the big picture you will miss!
You can’t just rush through life, that’s when major mistakes are made. Like when you are assigned to write an essay, but don’t start it until the day before it’s due. You are rushed to get it done in time so you only brush the surface of what you really want to say and then have to go back and do extreme editing. Or not riding very much a week before a competition because your training has been going good and getting extremely frustrated the day before your call to compete because your horse isn’t behaving. If you just worry about the big picture being ‘okay’ then you won’t do well. Sure, you will pass, but with low standards. You need to do more than just stop and smell the flowers, why not pick some up and carry them with you? Don’t just rely on one sense- smell. I have really bad allergies and can’t always smell. Use all of your senses! Feel the petals or thorns; listen to the sound it makes when you rub the leaves together. Careful though, you don’t necessarily want to eat them- you may bite off more than you can chew.
Don’t worry though, even if you don’t notice the difference in something at that exact moment, doesn’t mean that you are numb to the buzz of life that is whirling around you. Give it a moment, and the curtain will be drawn back to reveal what was truly there. It may feel like you are facing some frightening monster of a man, but if you are patient you might find out that it was just a simple man putting on a face. Don’t just run through life blind either, if you keep trying you will get to where you want to be. It may be a slower pace, but at least you will get it done correctly. You have to walk before you trot, trot before you canter, but when you finally reach that last gait and you are in control, you feel like nothing in the world can stop you. Be patient, no matter how hard it may be, you will be glad you did. Do you feel the Earth move beneath your feet? No, but we are all moving- even though it feels as though we are standing still.
