On creating a society where learning and growth are values and encouraged…
I have been riding horses since 2002. For most of that time I took weekly (or more often) lessons. I leased or owned horses that I rode daily, checking in regularly with a skilled coach. And still I consider myself, at best, an intermediate rider. I am not unusual.
While there are exceptions, in the equestrian world you will find a great, great many “beginner” riders doing things that, to an outsider, do not look beginner at all. Because, at least in the barns I have been part of, we are all acutely aware of how infinitely far we still have to go. One of my first coaches was emphatic that I shouldn’t ride with just one teacher for too long, and I should never, ever ride with a coach who wasn’t themselves taking regular lessons from someone else.
In the dressage community the assumption is: we aren’t finished. Even our most famous, most skilled riders get up every morning and go out to learn something. From themselves, their horses, their coaches, even from gravity.
These days I have three riding coaches. There is the coach I ride with every week (we’ll call her S). There is another coach (A) who I take lessons with perhaps six times a year. She provides a different set of eyes, a different set of skills, different experience. And my most recent coach (J) who I have ridden with twice now; S and A both take lesson from J as well.
Today was my second lesson with J, we (Bear and I) hadn’t seen her in a month and at the end of our 45 minutes together she smiled and said “that was really good Jo, you all have come a long way since your last lesson!” Those moments are important because the coach you ride with weekly doesn’t see the leaps in skill but the slow steady inching, you often don’t even see it yourself because you are inching.
I began thinking about how different the world I inhabit at the barn is from the rest of my life. Within the walls of the barn, and its sandy arena I am expected to be a perpetual student. To be ever refining, going deeper, learning and growing. Always. I am also expected to be my horse’s trainer, advocate, and coach. I am both teaching and learning, all the time.
Outside that place I move in a society of experts, where I am expected to be one too.
I think about the professional jobs I have held and how often they expected me to be perfect, to always be excellent. There was never an expectation that we were all students, constantly learning and growing, always looking back on last year and wondering how we managed.
A friend said recently that their definition of progressive was “perpetually curious and always open to the possibility that you might be wrong.“ And something clicked home for me. Because that is the attitude I encounter (when we’re at our best, we are human after all) in my barn community. Always curious, always certain there’s more to learn; that our knowledge might need refinement or even a radical shift. We don’t just take lessons ourselves we tend to hang over the fence watching each other’s lessons as well, constantly gleaning for another little bit to add to our collection of knowledge. Having a lifelong passion that involves an unpredictable half ton flight animal with opinions helps, surely.
But there is an element of that teachable, curious, beginner’s mind culture that seems to be missing in the culture at large. Certainly among those in power we can see clearly an intractability, a certainty that they are right. And we (as a society) reinforce this when we make fun of people who change their opinions (flip-floppers), when we expect perfection of thought or policy from any human being.
The more we demand certainty, the less we consider ourselves life long learners, the more intractable and inflexible we become. Until we cannot even shift when the proof of our error is there standing in front of us.
And this becomes problematic among certain (in my case Christian) progressive circles. For many of us who are progressive Christians we often define ourselves as who we are not. We are not homophobic, we are not racist, we are not antisemitic, we are not antiscience.
But when we don’t remain curious, when we don’t assume that we continue to have more to learn we are likely to wind up in trouble (no matter who we are!). Because there is no such thing in the modern Western world as someone who isn’t racist. Our society is racist. And we (all of us) swim in it like fish in the ocean. To be antiracist requires that we put on the mantle of student, that we be eternally curious, always looking to deepen our antiracist practice, to further discover and transform that racism that we exist within and that is planted within us.
The same is true for our work against homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism and more. It is true for our spiritual practices, our job skills, our emotional maturity, our relationships. Becoming a more mature, better person is not something we ever finish. Like becoming a good rider, it is something we must continue to be students of every day of our lives. That is the human calling.
After my lesson today one of my barnmates was sweeping the aisle. She laughed and said, “it makes me feel so much better when I overhear someone else’s lesson and the instructor is telling them the same things she told me!”
She’s a more advanced rider than I, but this is the truth of life. After a while learning is about refinement. About going deeper in the same material. And we are all of us working on much the same things, on the horse or off.
As part of my interfaith work I have spent a lot of time digging antisemitism and antiJudaism out of my Christian practice. It is everywhere there. And despite the fact that I’ve been at it for years, that I teach this stuff I’m still unpacking, still going deeper, still finding new layers I didn’t know were there. When a Jewish friend gently (or not so gently) corrects me yet again it is a moment of invitation. I can lash out in defense of who I am now, or I can step into the invitation to learn and grow and become better than I am right now. This too is the human calling.
Racism, misogyny, all of the harms we inflict on others in systemic ways will take a lifetime to remove, rebuild. And if we hope to be good people we must first and foremost be curious. Because to be curious is to admit we don’t know it all. And that is the first step to learning. Which, you guessed it, is the human calling.
But, and I cannot emphasize this enough, staying curious isn’t a solitary endeavor. When I am teaching my horse something new I have to reward him for trying to give me the right answer. If I only reward him for perfection he’ll give up long before he reaches it. He’ll decide (rightly) that I am unreasonable and it isn’t worth offering answers to the questions I ask.
But if I continually reward the try he’ll keep on trying and we will get there together. Horses are very intelligent creatures, but they (like humans) can fall prey to learned helplessness, to feeling powerless to get a good result. And they’re smart enough to stop beating their heads against that impossible wall.
We humans, we also need encouragement when we make an effort. I know it can be frustrating, when someone is just beginning to learn things we’ve known for a long time, or that were even givens for us (based on our context or background). But if we slap someone down as “not enough” when they try (even if the try isn’t successful) we’ll quickly train them to stop trying.
After my falls from my previous horse I had panic attacks at things that “should” have been easy. If my coach had thrown up her hands in disgust when I started crying at a simple request I would have given up, gone home, and stopped riding. But she didn’t. Maybe because she’d worked with horses for so long she just asked me to keep trying. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t do the “easy” thing, if I made even a tiny step in that direction I got praised and encouraged to try another step. And step by step we got me not only back to where I’d been but miles further on besides. These days I’m accomplishing things under saddle I never dreamed I could do, and I’m teaching my horse to do things I never dreamed possible either. My horizon has changed because it wasn’t the goal that was stressed but making another (small) step on the journey.
Those of us who have set ourselves on a path of lifelong growth and learning didn’t get here alone. No matter what obstacles we faced there were people along the way who have been our coaches and guides. Who we have learned from, and been encouraged by. And if we want to live in a world full of people growing, learning, hazarding that they might be wrong, we must grow into coaches ourselves.
