23/05/2026
This!
I have been riding dressage for thirty-four years.
I have been bad at it for all thirty-four of them.
These are not separate facts.
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I want to be clear about the nature of my badness. It is not the badness of someone who doesn't care, or doesn't try, or hasn't read the books and watched the videos and paid the clinicians and stood at the rail studying riders who make it look like nothing. I have done all of those things. I have done them extensively. I have, at various points, understood dressage completely, in the car on the way to the barn, in the shower, in the middle of the night when the answer arrives with the quiet certainty of revelation.
And then I get on the horse and the understanding evaporates like breath on a cold morning. There. Gone.
This has been happening for thirty-four years.
I had begun to suspect the problem was me.
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Fhil is six years old. He is large and enthusiastic and operates with the cheerful confidence of someone who hasn't yet been told how complicated this is supposed to be. He has big gaits, the kind that feel, from the inside, like riding a very talented earthquake. He is not subtle. He is not refined. He is, at this particular stage of his development, basically a golden retriever that someone has taught to trot.
I love him for this.
I got on Fhil last week with the usual cargo, the mental checklist, the position notes, the things Linds has said, the things the clinic rider did that I've been trying to replicate, the seventeen adjustments I was planning to make before the first corner. I carried all of it into the saddle the way I always do, like a man who has confused preparation with competence.
And then something happened.
Or more precisely, something stopped happening.
The checklist went quiet. The position notes dissolved. The seventeen adjustments reduced themselves, without my permission, to simply: this stride. Now this one. Fhil's back swung underneath me and I followed it and he followed me following it and somewhere in that exchange the thinking just... stopped. Not because I decided to stop thinking. Thinking doesn't respond to decisions. It stopped because something more immediate arrived and took up all the available space.
I don't know how long it lasted. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Long enough that when I brought him back to walk and the thinking rushed back in, as it always does, punctual and self-important, I sat there for a moment in the strange afterglow of it.
And I thought: I wasn't thinking. I was riding.
Which was, in thirty-four years not something I had thought before.
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Here is something no one ever told me.
You cannot think your way through it.
I know. I tried. For thirty-four years I tried. I approached it the way I approach everything, with research and analysis and the deep conviction that sufficient intellectual preparation would eventually produce the desired physical result. I treated feel like a concept to be understood rather than a sensation to be inhabited. I read about softness. I developed theories about connection. I had opinions, carefully reasoned, about the half-halt.
The horse was unimpressed by my opinions.
The horse is always unimpressed by your opinions. This is one of the great services the horse provides.
Because here is the thing about thinking: it's all consuming. It fills the available space completely, leaves no room for anything else, and calls this thoroughness. While you are thinking about the bend, you are not feeling the bend. While you are planning the transition, you are not present for the transition. While you are having the conversation with yourself about what should be happening, you are not listening to what is actually happening underneath you.
If all you do is talk, you never develop the ability to listen.
If all you do is think, you lose access to the present moment entirely.
And dressage, well real dressage, the kind that occasionally appears without warning on the back of a six year old golden retriever on an unremarkable Saturday morning, exists only in the present moment. It cannot be planned. It cannot be intellectually constructed. It can only be felt, in real time, by someone who has somehow gotten quiet enough to feel it.
The question is how do we get quiet.
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I have a theory about this. It is, given everything I just said about thinking, somewhat ironic that I have a theory about it. Bear with me.
I think you get quiet by getting lost first.
Not lost as in confused. Lost as in, the thinking finally exhausts itself. Thirty-four years of analysis and adjustment and correction and recalibration, and at some point the thinking runs out of new things to say and sits down, and in the silence that follows, something older and less verbal takes over. Something that has been accumulating in the body while the mind was busy having opinions.
The feel was always there. Underneath the thinking. Patient. Waiting for the thinking to tire itself out.
Which means, and this is the part that I find both deeply comforting and extremely inconvenient, the thirty-four years of badness were not wasted. They were the process. The thinking wasn't the obstacle to the feeling. The thinking was the thing that had to happen first, at exhausting length, before the feeling could surface.
I have spent thirty-four years getting bad enough at dressage to accidentally become good at it.
Or at least, to have fifteen minutes on a Saturday with a large enthusiastic six year old that felt, from the inside, like the whole thing finally made sense.
Have I gotten so bad that I've actually become good?
I genuinely don't know.
Fhil has no opinion on the matter. He's already thinking about breakfast.
And for once, I didn’t feel the need to have one either.
