It’s that time of year when everyone is all about “New year, new me.” Everywhere you look, someone is giving up this or that, out with the old and in with the new, giving up gluten and buying new yoga pants.
But not me, I’ll be eating bread in my wranglers till the cows come home. I am a creature of habit, so my resolution is to be grateful for what I have and to focus on my opportunities to make them sparkle. Well, that and cleaning out the tack room in my horse trailer but I digress to my previous and more realistic goal.
Sometimes, that old saddle in the barn just needs a little oil and elbow grease to shine the same way that persnickety horse in the barn needs to be turned out to run to relax.
My daughter has an 8-month-old filly named Sassy who, if she’s not giving me outright hell, is certainly living up to her name. If she isn’t caught under a fence she’s jumping one and typically directly into a pasture full of geldings who all want to kill her. She is going full “Hi Yo Silver,” when she sees the trailer, can chew through a wood rail faster than a herd of wild termites and is determined to show me whose boss. She is wild and most days, well … Sassy.
I’ve asked myself over and over, ‘What is the lesson for me to hear from a horse that won’t listen?’ This once dependent orphan foal, who we hand-raised from 10 days old, is now suddenly an independent 8-month-old filly with a mind of her own and a will of steel.
I have been taking it personally that this filly I gave everything to so she would survive now seems to be able to live without me just fine. But when I step back, I say, ‘Well, wasn’t this the plan all along?’ Maybe she needed me to survive and now that she has made it, it is I who needs her to teach me a lesson or two on living so that I can polish that opportunity up, too.
Sassy is the same horse, as I am the same ol’ me and from that perspective, it becomes clearer that despite my adamancy against it, we all change and adapt to environments and stimuli. We become different versions of ourselves around different people and that doesn’t mean we aren’t authentic, it means as time goes on, the same ol’ me or the same ol’ horse can become uniquely dynamic.
If, in an ever-changing world, you can become your horse’s constant, their pillar of trust, then new isn’t so scary and old doesn’t have to be forgotten. Moments become what is and not what could be or what has been.
Maybe I need a new lease on my old life to circumvent my aversion to change this new year. This wild little horse has me in the midst of some existential crisis, wondering if maybe I need to jump a fence or two into a pasture of danger every now and then to really feel alive.
Maybe, when I walk into the barn ready for an emotional saddle bronc ride, I need to improve my perspective rather than my prospects, which doesn’t mean I don’t need to yank her ass by the lead rope every now and then. It’s all about the amount of slack or lack thereof that makes the difference on who’s in charge.
I have found myself more than once considering that there’s a jerk on one end and a tug on the other till we find that release called trust. Maybe, like most teenagers, she is asking for limits while testing mine? Maybe it’s just that one of us has been the jerk for too long and not the tug.
Horses aren’t for the faint of heart. If you aren’t threatening to take them to the sale barn every now and then you aren’t really living and Sassy has me living my best life, that’s for sure. If there is one thing I have learned over the last year with this little filly it’s that every day is a new opportunity to learn to be the best ol’ version of yourself as a trainer, as a horse, as a human being.
So this year I am glad to have the same ol’ horse with a whole new batch of problems to tackle; it means we are growing and learning together how to rely on the same ol’ versions of each other.
Jenny Johnston is a fourth-generation Durango local part-time rodeo announcer and mother to two lil buckaroos.