a good partnership is honest
why sometimes there is a fight
A good partnership is honest, and an honest partnership has conflict.
the thought breaches my monologue about failure about two thirds into the drive home. I’ve ridden, but not in the flying pretty canter I wrote about before. I rode in the argumentative, pick-up-the-wrong-lead, throw your head in my face, I panic and get scared and stop riding with intention… yeah, in that way.
Despair is a companion in many of my moments of disappointment. She is ever-ready to tell me what went wrong, but not just that, what will never go right. Despair buckles herself into the passenger seat of my van and through the bends of the road I think about giving up on riding, I think about giving up on writing…
We don’t talk enough about this, this despairing. It’s uncomfortable to admit that our minds are sometimes the best liars, because they tell us something half true and rewired and misunderstood. There are neural pathways like constellations, and not all of them are hopeful, and not all of them are true.
In an old Christian tradition, this kind of despair has a name - desolation. It’s part of a rhythm of thought that Ignatius identified, part of the course of a human life. It is an ebb of the tide of hope and belief and wondrous in-touch-ness with God’s grace. And it was unsurprising, he taught, not something to fear because it happens, but something to notice in ourselves so that we might then look for the path again.
I am unpracticed in this discernment, this noticing, until I’m wading deep into it, until I’ve fallen in the river and suddenly think, oh I am here, it is cold, it is deep. And I didn’t even notice it when I was driving home after my ride until the thought appeared, a banner in my brain:
a good partnership is honest, and an honest partnership has conflict.
I am partners with my horse. We are two beings attempted to do and be a unity even while we do not share language or intuition or even the same kinds of awareness. He hears things I can’t, he sees things I can’t, I know things he doesn’t. When we ride we are partnered together, and a good partnership is honest.
Was I honest with him about the despair? Did I ride having already waded too deep into the belief that I was failing and so I rode that belief in the circle, into the canter, down through the trot?
It’s okay if in an honest partnership there is conflict. It is good, even, because it means we are being the selves we truly are, we are in it, even if in that honesty we learn that we have work to do elsewhere. I need not be angry at myself for feeling that desolation, even though it
We had a messy ride, but what a gift it also was to ride a hard ride and be interrupted in my despair by the truth: a good partnership is honest.
And even when I show up for him in imperfection, in despair, swimming in darker and colder waters in my own mind - I am with him.
And what a gift to be his partner.