We announced the 10 Blogger Contest finalists on Wednesday, and now we’re bringing you their awesome entries from Round 1 here on Bloggers Row. I will be posting all 10 entries over the next few days, so be sure to check them out and leave your feedback in the comments.
All entries will be reprinted without editing for fairness’ sake. Thanks again for your support and readership, EN! We are so thrilled to have such quality entries this year.
Entrant: Amanda Schmidt
Entry:
Call me Amanda. Not Mandy. I suppose you can call me an adult amateur – that’s how old and broke I am. I prefer to refer to myself as a lifer – sounds more gritty and glamorous. I’ve been at this horsey nonsense for two decades now, admittedly on and off, through better and worse. No, I don’t have much to show for it not in the way of fame, mileage, certifications, or bragging rights. Sometimes life doesn’t give two flying figs about your big dreams or your passion, and merrily sends you down agonizing detours. If one’s ability to hang tough for one second longer, to hold out when holding out seems completely futile, determined rank in this field – baby, I’d have gone pro long ago.
So I’ve been at this a little while now, and consequently meet with the dare to justify the horse life in general and this sport in particular on plenty of occasions. Some days, throwing one’s fists in the air and howling, “Go horses! Go eventing!” comes easy enough. Other days if feeling brave enough to follow the philosophical rabbit hole waaaay down becoming uneasy comes easy enough.
Choosing horses guarantees you the gamut of human emotional range – that I can answer for sure. The great “why?” remains hazy: why do this to ourselves and to these animals? Some days, I see nothing in it but pure egostroking, and adrenaline junkies just looking for a fix via the unworldly power and heart of a horse – a horse which, dare I say, we often take for granted.
If I’m raising your hackles, good. I think we all need checked on a regular basis, if we want to call ourselves responsible and want to profess that we love these horses. I’ve checked myself so hard that I spent a couple of years not riding, a couple of years quite close to washing my hands of this business. If you’re reading this, I’ll just assume that you understand how devastating that might have been. I’ll also assume that you can understand why I might do it; I’ll assume that you, too, would accept any pain if it meant sparing your horse.
To keep a long story short, I eventually came to rest in, “It’s not what we do, so much as how we do it.”Am I simply justifying something I’m not brave enough to let go of, by disguising my inability to do so in a pretty philosophical phrase? Maybe. Maybe I’ll come to that yet. We come to a lot of grief with these animals, in this sport. But the grief I’d know, the loss I’d experience without them, seems far worse.
Without this insanity, my life might have been spent mostly indoors in a safe, climate controlled bubble, to not risk my chronic poor health. I might be just another sad story of someone who knows summer only by the airconditioner, autumn only by the costumed kids on the doorstep. I can say with no uncertainty I would have grown up frail, isolated, and limited – if I’d managed to reach adulthood at all. Without this insanity, I quite possibly might have chosen a different razor’s edge, rather than pull on my boots and square my shoulders one more day.
In the end, I believe we do this because of an inner desire to know, to grow, to not settle for less than evolving into our full human potential. The horse waits and
patiently waits for us to decide to want that – the greatest teacher we could find stands ready for willing students. Anything I know about life as it really is, I learned on the back of a horse…or in absolute ruins at the feet of a horse, or in caring for a horse who could offer me “nothing” in return. I doubt I could have learned it elsewhere, and I believe the real insanity would be never going there, never stepping onto this path at all.
