Show Up
Sometimes we are supportive just by showing up for the in-between times.
Feliks had a horse show near Aiken, South Carolina, this past weekend. His horse had been acting up, and he wasn’t thrilled about going, but he had made the commitment, so he went. I was scheduled to teach a writing retreat the same weekend, but I felt he needed me to be there, so I taught the writing retreat from the AirBnB we shared with his trainer and another rider on the horse show grounds. It would have been far less challenging and less tiring for me to teach the retreat from home as I always do, but I needed to be there for him (and for his trainer).
Because of the schedule of my retreat sessions and his riding classes, I only got to see him ride once during the show. But I was there for the moments when he was discouraged or was just plain hot and tired and wanted to go home. I was there for the early morning wake-up calls that are hard for him, the running of errands for the riders in the afternoons, and the evenings spent laughing around the kitchen table, dead-tired and dusty.
I was there to lighten his mood by making him laugh and to help him navigate the sometimes awful nature of horse shows with gossip and passive-aggressive moments outside the ring and the class consciousness that pervades them. He and I got to speed around on a blue golf cart together in the afternoons after his classes and my retreat mornings, and we shared some laughs on the drive down to South Carolina and back. Well, not so much on the way back since he slept the sleep of a tired puppy.
Horse shows are somewhat painful for me–there is a lot of hurrying up and waiting involved, they’re not very efficient, and they are often very hot and dusty. You spend a day in the barn for about four minutes of riding. I always feel I could whip the shows into better shape, using my experience in creating corporate meetings for thousands.
But sometimes, we do things for others that we don’t want to do. And often, but not always, we do know when we need to just show up in whatever way we can. One morning at the show, Feliks jokingly said, “Well, why did you come if you can’t watch me ride?” and I told him about all the liminal spaces we were sharing during the four days we were there together. (I may also have told him the writing retreat was paying for the horse show, just to provide a reality check.)
Did I want to go? I really didn’t. It was a challenging enough weekend without adding a horse show. But showing up meant something. It helped something. It made it easier for everyone with me there to help ease Feliks through it. Am I glad I went? I surely am.
What would it take for you to show up for someone this week?
