I have made a decision. I found a new barn for Nic, and I'm moving her for no reasons other than I want her closer to my home and because I want to be at a barn with a resident trainer. Currently, she is a 1.5 hour round trip away, and, reader, I'm tired of driving that far on the weekends, with the miles stretching as long and as frivolous as ants marching to who knows where. She currently is housed close to my workplace, but that convenience is outweighed by the distance I travel over the weekends.I feel like this is a rash decision, as it has been very fast, and almost too easy, which always sets the alarm bells ringing in my head. But I found a nice place to move her to, with a resident trainer who is well respected, 15 min from Casa Maat. So, there it is.
I have ambiguous feelings about this move. On the one hand, the benefits (i.e., having her closer to me, having regular training sessions) are exciting, but on the other hand, leaving “the way we were” behind isn’t easy.
I've written in the past about Plato's Allegory of The Cave. One of Plato's main points is that the more one learns and progresses, the less one can go back to the place at which one began. It isn't a matter of choice. Ignorance is bliss for a reason; it's one less step towards the River Styx that is Enlightenment.
I'm a person that tends to look at situations with a kind of black-and-white finality - the closing of one chapter, the opening of a new one. That sense of finality is a heavy load; as I compare where Nic and I were a year ago, and especially the transformation over the past 3 months, to where we are now, the progression, albeit mostly intellectual, has been enormous.
Does water have second thoughts as it runs from the mountain, fresh but weak, to the field, to the sea, where it’s sometimes mire but sometimes clear?
When Pandora opened her box, and out popped Enlightenment, she had no idea of the Guernica it would breed: The “way things were” no longer suits the present or the future, and I can’t, with good conscience, return to a less-educated mindset as far as Nic is concerned. The pitfall of evolution is that some amount of simplicity is lost, and realizing one can't go back to the beginning, regardless of the benefits of progression, is a little sad, to say the least.When I fired Trainer, and started taking lessons with Napalm, possibilities opened up; things (like suppleness) that seemed impossible with the mare made sense, and I could see a plan from how to get from scary and unbalanced to something resembling a trained horse. Simultaneously, I knew, regardless of how much happier I was with the mare, that the old self that believed that I was training my horse correctly was killed by evolution, a casualty of Enlightenment. Out of that fractured psyche a new self was born.
Leaving my current barn produces the same tensions. The water is murky but also clear; decisions more complex, but also more simple. Finding a new barn and making the right choice in that sense is a difficult task; but the choice to move is a simple one to make. Either we move, or we stagnate. Just as the newly deceased must cross the River Styx, enlightened evolution isn’t a choice, it is clearly a must for me, but paying the ferryman certainly isn’t pleasant.
