Photo by Kimberly Loushin/Chronicle of the Horse.

Elvis is 7. He’s had an accomplished career in the young horse divisions, including being long listed for the World Breeding Dressage Championships for Young Horses. He understands collection beautifully; he takes a half-halt; he is respectful of the leg and is steady in the connection.

And he’s also been in my care for six weeks, a lot of which I’ve spent traveling, so I’m still absolutely at the beginning of our journey together, and it’s not fair for me to make any sweeping statements, but he’s got basically two options in the trot: wide open or wide open-er. When I try to make any changes to his outline, he loses rhythm. When I try to activate the hind legs in isolation, he jacks his knees up higher. I feel like I can do the Prix St. Georges, but I can’t just trot around in a quiet and boring fashion.

Puck is also 7. To say that he’s been complicated to get to this point would be an understatement, but now, with the exception of the occasional burst of youthful exuberance/juvenile delinquency, he’s fairly rideable. I can pick him up in the bridle or let him down, and the trot stays the same. I can make his canter quicker or floatier. I can ride him short or long in the neck, compressed or stretching in the back, strong or light. Of course I can’t really do anything—I’m thinking he’ll show third level if he shows this winter in Florida, but it’ll be a stretch of his abilities to put movements together—because I’ve focused more on the basic rideability (and also, admittedly, not dying) than on the upper-level work.

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Somewhere along the line, I heard the term “disaster fatigue.” It was in the mainstream media, at a time when there had been a few devastating natural disasters and a few mass shootings in the same time period, and the newscaster I heard use the term put it in the context of a slowing rate of donations to the Red Cross: The population was so exhausted by the barrage of calamities that they couldn’t feel the pain of them anymore and as such weren’t moved to donate to organizations to help the victims.

A few weekends ago, Danny colicked, badly and quickly. He was so dire so fast that he wasn’t able to get on the trailer to go to a clinic. We put him down.

I was on vacation.

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I drove up to spring Elvis out of quarantine myself, rode him once, and then left for a week with about a kabillion students to our regional championships. (We had rides from training level to Grand Prix, won a bunch of stuff, and experienced a 40-degree temperature change. Fun was had by all!) I then came home, rode everyone for a few days, and then tweaked a disk in my back. And then my coach, Michael Barisone, came for a clinic. I could barely post the trot, and I’d ridden Elvis three times on U.S. soil. Perfect!

All joking aside, clinics are not an opportunity to demonstrate perfect rides and perfect riding; they’re about learning and to learn at whatever place a particular horse and rider happen to be. The timing was actually rather great (well, the back thing has sucked; I’ve rested and iced and anti-inflammatoried and seen the awesome Dr. Holly Moriarty of Haymarket Chiropractic, and I’m feeling pretty good now), because I’m still learning what normal is for Elvis, and it was really illuminating to start the process of connecting his look to his feel.

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