The Best Horse Sense

Tom Morris, a friend I met on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TomVMorris), sent a couple of tweets today that got me thinking about learning new skills. Tom said that simplicity and elegance require confidence and that when we are unsure we complicate things. What I think that Tom is saying that someone with experience can find the elegant solution because he is confident that his solution is correct and inexperienced people will throw as much as they can at a problem because they don’t know what works. My take is a little different. I think that inexperienced people tend to have complicated solutions because they haven’t found the simple, elegant solution, yet.

 

By the time you reach adulthood, your mind and body have developed a pretty good relationship. If you need to go to the grocery store, your mind knows how to tell your body to pick up the car keys, put on your jacket, open the door, walk to the car, get in, and turn it on. You turn around to watch behind the car as you back out of the driveway, and ease out onto the street. With years of experience, you know just how much pressure to put on the brake and accelerator. You can steer so that you make dozens of minute corrections to the steering wheel each minute to keep your car on the road. Because you have the confidence and the experience, your motions are spare, smooth, and simple.

 

For all of these activities, your mind and body have learned to get along and work together, and you can perform these tasks with little conscious effort. Now, imagine that you pick up a new activity, say, horsemanship. And this activity requires that your mind and body learn all sorts of new tasks. Your mind and your body may start to rebel a little bit. Your mind will say, “Huh? You want me to do what?” Your body will say, “Hey, this wasn’t the deal. After we got through that gawky teenage stage, we weren’t going to have to learn anything new.” And, “I figured I wouldn’t ever have to bend this way again.”

 

Learning new physical tasks is one of the more fascinating parts of my adventure in learning horsemanship in middle age. And it all started with handling the lead rope.

 

One of our first tasks was learning how to just swing the end of the rope. We had to practice this when the rope wasn’t attached to the horse so that we didn’t confuse, frustrate or hurt the horse. The task is to let out three or four feet of the end of the lead rope and twirl it in a circle. At first, it’s hard to find the rhythm so that the rope doesn’t flop around and to make the circle clean and smooth. The mind and body are working hard to build new pathways, new muscle memory. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable.

 

When I was a kid and learning new stuff like this, I would go practice in my room with no one watching before I let anyone see me struggle with it. Now, I understand that the struggle is part of the process. I can just laugh at my mistakes and fumbling.

 

But soon, a magical thing happens. All of a sudden, the feel is there. The timing is there. My mind has figured how instruct my body to move so that the rope feels just right in my hands and the circles are smooth and easy. Not only does the rhythm of the swinging rope feel comfortable and easy, but there is a thrill of learning something new.

 

I’ve found myself noticing this same process in most everything new I learn. There is the “Huh?” part, where I’m not sure what I am supposed to do. Then, comes the awkward, clumsy steps that are the necessary process to mesh the mind’s goals with the body’s knowledge of the task. And with enough repetitions and tries, something clicks and it all works.

 

Pretty soon, I’ve forgotten how hard it was to learn the task and I can do it without thinking. I can start swinging the rope with either hand. Or over my head. Or touch the end of the rope to a rock that is on the ground in front of me. Or touch my toe with the rope. I can swing the rope with some energy behind to get a horse to move away, or I can gently lay it across her back in a friendly, easy motion.

 

Recently, I was working with a young mule that was resistant to being led to her pen for dinner. She wanted to stay with her buddies. She turned away from me and showed me her butt. With hardly a thought, and in a blink of an eye, I swung the end of the lead rope so that it popped her on the butt with a nice smack. It got her attention and she quickly turned to face me. As we continued on toward her pen, I smiled as I remembered that at one time, it was difficult for me to even hold the rope without getting it tangled, and now the rope is just a simple extension of my body.

 

In learning to work with the rope, my mind and body have found the elegant, simple solution to making it move and work for me. Yes, I am confident in my use of the rope, but it’s the experience and muscle memory that make my motions fluid and easy. In my beginning days, my motions were jerky, complicated, and difficult. It wasn’t my lack of confidence that caused the clumsy rope work, but my lack of experience. The elegance flows from experience, and it’s the experience that gives me confidence.