The Day Plan They Never Asked Us For: Noticing a Horse’s Agenda in Plain Sight
The Day Plan They Never Asked Us For: Noticing a Horse's Agenda in Plain Sight
It came to me on an unremarkable morning when no task demanded my attention.
The herd had already begun making choices before I had even secured the latch behind me. A single horse moved toward the distant boundary of the pasture—unhurried, unguarded, yet wholly resolved. Two companions trailed him briefly, then veered away as though recalling separate matters of their own. Not one glanced in my direction for guidance. None acted as though they awaited management. The day had commenced without consulting me.
I lingered there longer than I typically would, recognizing how frequently I misread a horse's stillness as obedience. Yet what unfolded before me was not "good behavior." It was purpose. A deliberate path. An internal schedule known only to them. How often do we, too, mistake the quietude of others for agreement—when really, they are simply moving according to designs we never thought to ask about?
They traveled as though motion itself belonged to their agenda—because it does. Horses are designed for an existence where distance accumulates naturally, where wellness is maintained through perpetual, gentle wandering. When we share our lives with them without riding or drilling, we can still respect this architecture: not through imposing direction, but by observing how powerfully they will structure their hours around the land available to them. Perhaps we, too, are built for more movement than modern life permits—our bodies quietly asking for miles we rarely give them.
Then the subtlest moment made the whole scene feel even more like self-determination. A mare bypassed the most inviting stretch of grass and paused at a damp, worn patch where the earth remained dark. She dropped her muzzle, inhaled, and pressed deliberately into the mud with slow precision. This was not idleness. It was choice.
We speak of care as something we extend to others, yet horses also tend to themselves. They pursue what heals: mud against the skin, specific herbs, even soil itself when the body whispers for something particular. There is nothing supernatural about it. It is simply a creature addressing its needs with whatever resources exist—the way any living organism strives to do. We might remember that we, too, carry ancient knowledge about what restores us, if only we paused long enough to listen.
The shift in me was not the addition of some new practice. It was withdrawing from the habit of interpreting every action as a puzzle requiring my solution. Coexistence, on mornings like this one, means allowing a horse to retain their own reasons—accepting that they are not standing by for an assignment of meaning. What liberation might we find in extending this same grace to the people around us, trusting that their stillness or motion carries its own coherence?
By the waning hours of afternoon, that same horse who had departed first returned along the identical diagonal path, as though completing a circuit he had inscribed across the landscape hours before. I did not summon him. I offered no signal. I simply witnessed the serene conviction of a creature fulfilling what he had set out to accomplish.
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