we take ourselves with us

gently a new year begins

My headlights cut through the dark on my way home from the barn, the last bits of sunlight falling fast back into the earth. I’m driving slower than usual, trying to hold too many thoughts in my head. The quickness of January’s arrival has caught me off-guard, and with it, the closing of a year, the opening of the new.

I’ve been watching another rider around the arena, after a hard lesson of my own. It was the kind of hard where you are not sure if you’ve gotten better or worse, if you’ve forgotten all the things you’ve been taught, if your body is, in fact, connected to your mind. Progress isn’t linear, I tell myself and others, and then of course the belief slips through my fingers, water in my palms.

The other rider is abler than myself. I notice that. I notice myself noticing that. I take myself to the car and I start to drive home and the darkness falls fast around me and there I am, with myself, noticing all this noticing.

I promised myself when I began horseback riding that I would protect myself from competition by not entering it. I don’t ride for judges or in open shows, I don’t ride for the ribbons or the scores. I thought this was enough - avoid the arenas in which you know yourself to be vulnerable (to jealousy, to criticism, to envy, to pride).

Did I think if I left those arenas I would not take myself with me?

I am always with me. I arrive even in the places that aren’t, by themselves, places where my own habits are quick to rise. The habits of my heart are always being unlearned, even on a drive home from a regular Monday night or in the carpool line realizing that other mothers make better snacks or make crafts.

I am always with me. I carry all my selves in this tender, fragile miracle of bones and water, of mind and heart, oxygen keeping me, minute by holy, ordinary minute, alive.

The new year screams at us to be new, to undo our vices and redo our virtues, to remake ourselves as if we are not always the selves we have always been even and all the selves we will yet become.

But wherever we go, there we are.

And the world still makes a space for those selves, past and present, future ones we hope but perhaps cannot force ourselves to become.

How do I know this?

My horse is perhaps the only one in the arena who does not judge me in comparison with another rider. He’s been ridden by more capable riders, of course. He’s been trained to a higher level than I am capable of, right now. He has somewhere in the muscles of his memory leg yield, haunches in, counter-canter. But that lives inside him without judgment of me, because what matters is the ride we are in. What matters are the ways he and I connect to each other, work with each other, in this moment.

Can we be that tender with ourselves? Can we be our horses, who do not compare us to each other the way that we do, but require only our fullest selves, moment by moment?

This is what I want from a new year: to ask for my fullest and best self without a judgment of who that should be, nor a demand on what she looks like, or what skills she has. To unlearn some habits with the same cheerfulness and joy that comes with learning new ones.

Wherever we go, there we are. May we rejoice to find ourselves still here, still becoming.