The cardinals that come to our feeder are starting to grow their adult feathers. There is something I particularly love about cardinal fledglings at this stage of their lives: half-grown, beaks still brown instead of their future orange, and splotches of red growing in between their first colors. They seem to wear the truth of growing up: it’s never all at once, it is often difficult and we look unfinished for a long time until, suddenly, we seem to have reached the end.
But of course that isn’t true, is it? We haven’t reached the end, if anything we’ve only reached a new beginning, something we didn’t predict, more life still spooling in front of us.
I watch the cardinals in their unwieldy flights, imperfect, fledging. They fall down, they scramble to get their wiry feet secured against the edges of the feeder. Their eyes are the same bright as my children who - I keep realizing - are also growing into themselves every day. They’re shedding their first feathers.
I was on the phone the other day with teachers trying to explain what it has taken me years to believe about myself, but only seconds about my children and in some way about all the smallest beings of this world: “it is about progress, not performance.”
I want to see my children grow but I don’t want to measure that growth on a scale of arbitrary milestones, typical behaviors, ordinary courses of events. They are fledging like the cardinals and that fledging is as unique as the patches of red showing through that young male’s brown, his beak even now turning orange, bit by tiny bit. He does not measure himself - and nor do we - by the performance of this growth but by the progress of it, the transformation. I wonder at the fact of the change but I don’t demand that the change conform to some standard. Is this bird late for his beak turning orange a week after his brothers? Is this bird better, in some cosmic way, because she did it a week earlier?
I made a vow to myself at the beginning of my riding life that I would not compete. It seems silly, sometimes (all the time) - I’m a competitive animal by nature. I want myself to be the best and I have always measured my life by performance and I loved riding so much that very first ride on Sister and that very first time walking around the arena that I promised myself - I will protect this from the harm my own mind can do. So every ride - the ones I write about, and the ones I don’t - belongs fundamentally to my heart, and not my head.
It isn’t that I don’t want that transformation into goodness, into excellence. It isn’t that I don’t get on and off this horse trying every ride to be better. But I’ve presented my self with a conundrum about who and what and why the better, because I removed the performances, the competitions, the external approvals. I keep myself from the measures of what I should be doing at two years in so instead I must ask every single time what can I do today? How might I grow now?
Only in fighting hard enough for my children to know the point is the progress, the growth, the patches of beautiful red feathers that show through a still-beautiful downy brown, do I dare to find a trace of it for myself.
May we fledge together, each as we ought to go.