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May 2008 • VOLUME 33 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Riding By Torchlight
The little things… Appreciating the little things can be hard to do when reaching for lofty goals. It’s one of the challenges for the aspiring dressage rider. Few people enter into the realm of this ancient training practice because the twenty meter circles are irresistible and deeply enticing. More likely, passage, piaffe, tempi changes and floating half passes beckon like mermaids in the waves. But in the real world, while dreaming of passage, a decent working trot may have to suffice. You may have to settle for a correct canter depart with a minimum of ‘baubles’ while fantasizing about tempi changes. That’s life – and that’s dressage. Inspiration is easy, accomplishment requires steadfastness and hard work. We build, step by step, the staircase to the heaven we envision. Along the way, we have to be content with the nuts and bolts of building new skills and painstakingly improving upon our craftsmanship, however pedantic the process may seem and feel at times. And just as important as our attention to detail, is our recognition of the little things our horses do to help us along. Training the dressage horse means creating an exquisitely balanced and gymnastically organized horse, a horse easily mobilized by the rider’s aids. When we watch a superbly trained and ridden horse, we see this taken to the full extent of its meaning, and it can be deeply moving and enthralling. What we don’t see are the hours and days and years of quiet practice, months of unimpressive exploration, and perhaps countless moments of frustration laced with perplexity as unforeseen challenges rise to thwart the progress. Hopefully, there were also an infinite number of occasions of praise and acknowledgement of the accomplishments of the horse, however apparently insignificant they may have been. While a simple turn on the forehand may be a piece of cake to one horse, to another it could mean an occasion for resistance and even panic. For this second horse, just the slightest movement of the haunches would then need appreciation, in light of the hurdles he overcame to make the effort, and in anticipation of the doors this effort now opened to bigger and better things. Flying changes may come naturally to one horse, but be a source of mystification to another, in which case perhaps a simple change well performed would be the source of great delight and gratitude on the part of the rider, acting on the knowledge that a building block of the lead change was now well in place, having helped create part of the strength, balance, coordination and skill required for the flying change. Rarely does a horse train ‘by the book’ and we have to think outside of the box, again and again. At times like this, only the recognition of the smallest of changes, the tiniest of improvements, and the willingness to explore and build on these while temporarily forsaking the ultimate goal, may provide some light to illuminate the way.  The masters know this, and try to pass this on to us in books, but the experience of the day to day work with a horse and the many choices and decisions made in the course of one session - when to reward, when to carry on, when to be happy with what seems like next to nothing and end on the only positive note you found all day - are hard to distill and pass on in one short book. Luckily for us, in more recent times,
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