LUCKY, LUCKY, LUCKY YOU!!!

It lay before me,  miles of boarded pastures and paddocks free of manure set alongside a cross country course more appropriate for a show than a private property.  I was there to watch Capt Mark Phillips, Chef d' Equipe for the US Equestrian Team, conduct a training session for Eventing's High Performance Riders.  To watch and to learn, yet, I was captured by the beauty of the day, of the moment...

I looked around and there they were...  The two of them - tall, thin, each sitting solid and deeply in the saddle on a powerfully elegant horse.  They carried with them the lightness of youth as their silhouettes framed the farm beyond.   I gasped, out loud, for all who would hear, "Do you get up every morning and thank God for everything you have?  Do you know how lucky, really lucky you are to have all of this?

 For that brief moment, it was all about them...  Do they? Then,  WHOA...  DO I?

As a 50 year old Novice rider,  I am pretty sure that the Captain, is not going to invite me to Ocala next year for a lesson or two.  And, I'm kind of sure that Karen and David O'Connor are not going to have me "hop on" one of the greenies to tune them up.  And I am more than a little bit worried that one of the Big Name Trainers might have a comment or two about my middle-aged buttocks.

Yet, I am no less lucky than those two women riding on the most perfect day on that most perfect farm.  It really hit me, in that one second after judging them as spoiled and maybe not grateful, do I really get how lucky I am?  Do I thank God, really thank God, for all that I have even though in some "other-world", I do not have all that is perfect? 

If I didn't yesterday, I will right now!   And, I hope that I remember this moment when it snows yet again or when the barn inhabitants greet me less than enthusiastically, that I have a gifted life (even if my bottom is a bit... um, unfirm)!