09/18/2026
Wow… no words, just wow!
Stephen Forbes WOW✨
The horse does not know it is being watched, and this is what I envy in him. He moves and the moving is the whole of him. There is no second horse standing behind the first one, checking whether the movement was correct. I, on the other hand, am always two people riding: the one who rides, and the one who watches himself ride and finds himself insufficient. Perhaps this is why the judges give higher marks to my horse than to me. He has achieved what I still reach for: to be entirely inside the thing happening, instead of one step outside it, narrating.
They call it "throughness", this word that means the aid travels from the leg to the mouth without stopping to ask permission anywhere along the way. I think what they are really describing is a body that has stopped doubting itself in the middle of the sentence. I have never once finished a sentence, in life or otherwise, without doubting it somewhere in the middle. The horse does not have this problem. The horse is not interested in whether the trot means something. The trot simply is, the way the sea is, the way my own hand at the end of my arm is, before I ask it to prove anything.
They will give the test a number afterward. 68%. As if a percentage could hold what happened between us, which was not measurable, which was closer to what happens when two silences recognize each other. I have always distrusted numbers that follow an experience the way a photograph follows a moment, keeping its shape, and losing everything that made it alive.
And still I will look at the number. I will look at it the way one looks at a mirror that has been asked the wrong question. It will tell me where my horse was crooked, where the bend was late, where the transition arrived a half-second before I was ready for it to arrive. It will be correct, and its correctness will mean almost nothing, because it was never in the room for the part that mattered. The part with no shape, the part I cannot show anyone, the part that happened only once and only between the two of us and will not happen in exactly that way again.
The scoresheet only tells you how correct you were. It doesn't tell you how great the ride was.
