“Aren’t we all forced to live with the decisions we make?” The wise words of Lady Mary resonated in my head as I scrolled through my news feed and wondered if it was weird to think that even though your baby is super cute, I still think my horse is cuter. If you are wondering who Lady Mary is, please minimize this window and immediately amend your Netflix queue to include Downton Abbey- all of it. Anyway, it’s funny how a simple Facebook news feed can make you question the decisions you’ve made and the trajectory of your life, or repeatedly remind you that you are exactly where you are meant to be; as I believe wholeheartedly that I am.

I’m 30, there I said it. If you had asked me ten years ago where I would be when I was 30 I assure you I would have given you an entirely different scenario than the one in which I live. When I was twenty I was dangerously sure of myself and my sunny future as an art teacher with a cute house and 2.5 children and 4 dogs.  Now, I realize that had that “plan” come true, I would now be terribly unhappy and unfulfilled. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of friends that took a more traditional domestic path and are blessed with precious children and tremendous happiness. I LOVE looking at their cute pictures and hearing their funny stories and I totally applaud them for being able to get two kids up, dressed, fed and in the car and to school by 8am and managing to look cute doing it! I can barely feed my dogs and find clothes to wear by 8am, much less worry about trying to even speak to anyone else most days. The point is, as the wisdom of being 30seems to spill upon me from every corner of the universe, I am becoming more and more at peace with my less than traditional life- in fact, I love it. Thank goodness for 2011, my worst and best year, where the choices I made, made over my life, and instead of feeling selfish about it, I finally just felt like me. Now I wake up and I know that I am loved, I know that I am thankful for the day and the chance to be present in it, and I know that there is “something more” for me. One day, if I do have 2.5 children and go back to teaching art, I will be ready for it and happy about it, but for now, my life spent with horses, and “horse people” and on the road to here and there is exactly what I need. Every day is a bit of an adventure, and every night I go to bed tired in a good way. I am in fact, entirely able to get up before 8am and get horses ready and in tip top shape for horse shows, because horse shows are still exciting, exhilarating, challenging and fulfilling for me. The majority of the horses I take care of are not mine, never will be, and I will never be the one to ride them into that competition arena, but when they succeed, when they learn and when they exhibit the great athleticism that they possess (hopefully in an obedient manner), it still thrills me to my core. That’s how I know I’m supposed to be in this world.

So many of my non-horsey friends and family ask me what it’s all about to live in the “horse world” now, as they call it. It’s not really something that can be explained in literal terms, and it’s not something that I dare say, the majority of people would care for, but for those of us that know, and understand, and want to be there, the horse world is everything. Over the past few years working at a big eventing farm and traveling, sometimes endlessly, to shows, I have learned a lot about our sport. Some things I’ve seen, heard, and witnessed have made me angry and sad and disillusioned for a while, but at the core, our sport is still about the love and respect for the animal- the horse. Eventers are a bit of a subculture. Many of us are a little rough around the edges after years spent in too much sun, working too hard for too many hours; but so many of us do all that because we want to, not because we have to. It surely isn’t done for the glamorous prizes, the sheer celebrity, and the big fat paychecks. We can, or do, have “regular” jobs” with regular hours, and most of us have to, to even get to be a part of this world. We toil away in the sun, rain, snow, hail, thunder, mud, more mud, and wind, because we just love it. I’ve seen the most fabulous sunrises, sunsets, farms, land, animals, storms, and places solely because of this sport. There’s no way to explain to someone the feeling of a perfect cross country ride, or when your horse finally puts his damn head down and understands what you want in the dressage. Unless you’ve felt it, you just can’t know. If you ask any of those seemingly “rough” eventers about their best ride and their greatest horse, they will become poets in front of you, with smiles that linger in their eyes as they tell you their stories. It always boils down to being just about the horse and the partnership, the ups and downs and challenges and failures are inevitable, but so worth it. There aren’t many sports where you can truly be a lifelong learner, where Olympians still take lessons, instead of just teaching them, or where your “equipment” has a mind of it’s own and your competitors are also your best friends.  That, is my “horse world” in a nutshell and I feel lucky every day to be a part of something so much bigger than just me.

So here I am, in my 30^th year, in a great house in the country, with two dogs, two horses, one goldfish and someone that I love more than I could ever say, and I’m so glad that my choices, some great and others questionable, brought me here. Tomorrow morning, when I wake up and look out my window and see a field full of horses, I’ll be reminded again that doing what you love is never the wrong choice.