Chazot Thoughts 84

Chazot Thoughts 84

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Chazot 18.1 OTTB

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“A girl should be two things; classy and fabulous.” (Coco Chanel)

He furthered the statement in his mind, “so does a horse.” I was surprised by his next thought, “But then, we have to become a lion.” This is when I read the quote; “To survive a nation of sheep, ruled by wolves, owned by pigs, you must become a lion.” I find the quote offensive, but not for humans. The quote is offensive for us, animals. Wolves kill for food, not for fun. By contrast, they educate their youngsters and respect and protect their elderlies. Pigs are smart and, given a chance, they treat us as equals. “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” (Sir Winston Churchill.) We all are part of nature and the human war against nature is inevitably a war against humanity and by extension, against us. Paraphrasing Herman Daily, “There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it was a business in liquidation.”

One thing he taught me was not losing time deploring a situation but instead, finding solution. “Looking at life from a different perspective makes you realize that it’s not the deer that is crossing the road, rather it is the road that is crossing the forest.” (Muhammad Ali) Maybe you need to look at life from a different perspective. You have an intelligence allowing complex engineering and great creativity, but you have lost ethic and decency. Look at dressage movements. They were originally gymnastic exercises educating our physique for the athletic demand of war, farming or urban activities. Entertainments were at this time mostly the airs above the ground. When dressage movements became compulsories ordered in dressage tests, standards of judgment defined how the movements were supposed to be presented and judged. Trainers figured ways to make us fit the judging standards focusing on the look instead of the function.  The original intent, developing and coordinating our horse physique for the athletic demand of the gaits and performances, was no longer the aim and many of us have performed and still perform out of our talent but with a dysfunctional physique. As a direct result, we develop lameness. You train and ride us based on opinions more than knowledge. “Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.” (Bill Bullard)

You say you have sympathy for us but your dialogue is about making us do it. Instead of analyzing our difficulties in respect of the underlying biomechanics factors, you judge our performance in respect of the judging standards. We try to talk to you about tensegrity, elastic energy, force transport, close kinematics chains, and you bring down the dialogue at the level of superficial observations. When you think that half pass develops the amplitude of the outside foreleg movement because the limb has to cover more ground passing in front of and around the inside foreleg, you miss the real benefit of the gymnastic exercise. The swing phase results for a great part from the elastic energy store in the tendons, aponeurosis, fascia muscles, during the stance. Half pass does help to develop the propulsive activity of the forelegs but instead of focusing on the neck posture thinking that bending the neck will place the outside shoulder forward, greater efficiency demands reducing the load on the forelegs and therefore understanding how our back muscles convert the thrust generated by the hind legs into upward forces. 

“Be a nuisance where it counts. Be depressed discouraged, and disappointed at failure and the disheartening effect of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics- but never give up.” (Marjory Stoneman Douglas) Don’t give up your skill and intuition for an equitation that demeans you real value. Don’t give up our soundness for a pyramid of training that is indeed a grave. We are very willing to talk to you about the way our physique effectively functions once we realize that you have empathy based on adequate knowledge and we can count on your capacity of analysis to identify the source of our difficulties. Then, we believe in you and we partner with you. Greater efficiency is for us, ease and effortlessness and on a long term, soundness. We naturally protect whatever muscle imbalance or morphological flaw that we have. We protect ourselves from you when you want us to perform without analyzing and addressing our muscle imbalance. We partner with you when we feel through your guidance that you coordinate our physique for the athletic demand of the move.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” (Franklin Roosevelt) But the dreams cannot be achieved repeating the same things. Old ways don’t open new doors, but upgrading the wisdom of our ancestors to actual knowledge does. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, you should look for what is and not what you think should be. What is, evolves with knowledge. We do not function the way your ancestors believed but you can upgrade their wisdom to actual knowledge. Looking at our movements under the eye of a microscope allows you to realize that elasticity does not result from release but instead from resistance to elongation. Within the muscle, the filaments titine, which are component of muscle elasticity, increase tension when elongated. This explains the very large elastic stiffness diversity of the muscles. We do not perform through slackness, we perform through tension. We understand and gladly partner with harmonic tensegrity. We resent and resist lack of muscle tone, relaxation.

"I am following Nature without being able to grasp her." (Claude Monet) The paintings of Claude Monet are classy and fabulous because he respects and tries to understand nature. Your dialogue with us will became classy and fabulous if you look for what is instead of what you think should be; if you look for knowledge instead of opinion; if you respect our nature by evolving with advanced knowledge of our nature. To succeed, you have to follow Eleanor Roosevelt advise. “Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway.” (Eleanor Roosevelt) But, remember that intuition is not infallible; knowledge is the key.

Chazot