I grew up on the back of a horse going to horse shows.
I started at a casual level when I was 8 or 9, and by the time I was 11 or 12, my trainer encouraged us to go to the shows he was going to… which were extremely competitive.
Showing horses is a team sport, but the team is you and your horse. After that it’s every man for himself, so although we had a common bond, friendships weren’t easy.
We were a group of tweens and teenagers, typically socially awkward and insecure, with a dash of fierce competition thrown into the mix.
Somewhere near the end of my show career, my mom who had been with me every step of the way was talking with one of the (very few) boys that had been showing with us for a couple of years by that point.
In that conversation he told my mom that I was the only person who had spoke to him and made him feel welcome when he came to his first horse show.
I had no recollection of doing that, I might have made a bigger effort to do it more if I had known that it was going to be something that stuck with people enough to talk about years later.
After all of those years of showing I never truly felt like I “belonged” to the group. When you don’t feel like you belong somewhere, you are typically hesitant to take on the role of welcoming others into the non-belonging group.
But maybe if we all cared about each other, even the people we don’t know … we might just make a difference to someone, and that will be the legacy we leave behind.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou