and then I flew

what the statistics don't show

“Big canter, GO!” she shouts as we careen down the long side of the arena. “Don’t let him fall out of it!” I kick in what I think, for a brief moment, could be the end of me.

And then we’re flying.

Cantering a horse is a kind of impossible thing - I know, I know, I’ve said this so often, I know you’re tired of listening to it by now —

Oh, look. I’m falling down a rabbit hole again. I spent too many minutes earlier today looking at what posts got the most likes this past year, looking for a way to say that same thing, slightly differently. I spent too much time fretting over whether I have gained a “following” (what is that, really?) and then fretting more that I hadn’t. I looked at traffic, I looked at likes and comments, I looked and I looked.

And now I am tongue tied on this page because I want to tell you about this moment I had on my horse two days ago, and I’m also too aware even as I write it down that it could be boring, it could go unopened, it could underperform.

It’s surprisingly easy to bruise your own skin looking at those numbers.

Whatever I do now is an act of resistance or compliance, of writing in defiance of what I think will be popular, and writing what I think people want. It’s imperfect, already, and now my motivations are tangled, but I really want to tell you about this moment of flying, and I know that if I hesitate, I’ll fall out of it just as he falls out of the canter.

This is what I want to tell you:

the moment before you fly is the moment you think you shouldn’t. I’m on the horse in a trot, a decent if not spectacular one. I’m counting the one, two beats, I’m overthinking if my elbows are bent and whether I’m relaxed.

And she shouts at me to pick up the canter.

We say this a lot in horseback riding - “pick up a trot” or “pick him up again,” or “in that corner, pick up…” as if the movement itself is lying on the ground waiting for us. And it sounds simple, doesn’t it? We reach out, we reach down, we pick it up. I tell my children all the time that they can pick themselves up after falls and disappointments and frustrations.

But of course that is the very first gesture at the real thing, which is to carry it, and ourselves, forward.

I can cue a canter - swing back my outside leg, sit up, sit back, sit deep, I can create the space within my body for his body to move into a new gait -

but then I must sustain it. And this sustaining it, this is the thing that I struggle with. The same mind that I have built so much of myself into - my analytic, always thinking, always searching for solution, always imagining new questions and new angles -

this mind is the problem in my riding. Or rather, this mind being unwilling to let herself go silent and let others work, is the problem in my riding. My mind is a keeper of commands and she shouts them loud to my other body parts: she tells my legs to stop swinging, my hips to move with the motion, my arms to follow, follow, follow…

What I need to do to fly in the canter is stop thinking quite so much.

What I need to do to fly in my life is not to stop thinking, but sometimes, to stop only thinking or always thinking or overthinking. Sometimes our bodies do know how to move us through to good things without our minds always interfering. It can just be enough to hug my kids without the noise about being a good mother or whether I’ve given them enough safety or security or love. It can be enough to sit on the couch with my person and let myself breathe without the need to ponder something or say something else.

What I need to do to fly in my writing is not to spend words on the worry that you will not read this - whoever you are, in whatever moment this finds you -

but to tell you that when I stopped thinking?

I flew.