On Luck

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about luck in horses.

We most often talk about it in terms of bad luck: a thrown shoe, a tack failure, a freak injury, a colic out of nowhere. A horse that falls through the cracks and ends up in a terrible home. It’s the kind of thing everyone horse person expects and to some extent plans for. They are large, fragile, active animals and they do weird things at weird moments according to their own internal logic. That is a given.

I’ve been thinking more, though, about good luck. More specifically, how much of it is unknowable and ineffable at any given time.

I would submit that to have a long journey with horses – and even more, with one horse in particular – you have experienced along the way a great deal of good luck. Ways that the universe aligns that you could never even know to count.

Next week, I will have owned Tristan for 18 years. That is an incredibly long stretch by any measure. If you count birthdays as January 1, he’ll be 29 years old. (for pure sentimental reasons I count his birthday in April, but frankly it’s all arbitrary)

How does a horse get to that age with the kind of life he’s had? I work hard every single day to be a good horse person, and to make good decisions for him; to make sure that he receives the best possible care and treatment, and stays healthy and happy. I’m so far from alone in that, though: there are top horses at every barn in the country whose every step is analyzed, watched, personalized, and on and on.

What I am trying to say is: there is a strong element of good luck in the way that I have matched up with Tristan, and the way we have grown together. He is not a horse that would have thrived in that program of being obsessed over. He needs a certain amount – well, quite a lot, really – of being left the hell alone. His inflexibilities are many but they are ones that work for me, and the way we have lived our lives together across three states and seven (!) different barns.

Despite his many weird medical things over the years, there are also plenty of places where we lucked out. Things were caught at just the right moment, the slightly unorthodox treatment fit the challenge perfectly, or in last year’s case – I had spent literal years building up a savings account that could take a $10k hit to send him five states away for highly specialized surgery.

Thinking of it this way helps me be grateful instead of tired and wary for the next shoe to drop. Horse ownership is an exercise in constant vigilance, but if you dwell too much on that you get worn down and worn out.

I’d rather celebrate the moments when things turned for the better.