I have had three cups of coffee today and my heart might actually be beating irregularily.
When a young horse gets saddled for the first time, you never quite know how it will react. One might just smell the saddle and then calmly let you tighten the girth, barely moving its ears. Another might stand completely still at first, just to explode once he’s allowed to move. It’s something restricting, tight, and it needs to be gotten rid of. Around and around the young horse will lope in the roundpen, kicking and bucking, until the fur on his neck is wavy with sweat.
Recently, I’ve been feeling like such a horse. Like Victor, the chestnut youngster at Time Out Farms, who just simply couldn’t accept being restricted by anything. I want to kick and buck and tell everyone to fuck off.
The problem is, if he had just stopped for a moment, taken a proper breath and just felt past the newness of the saddle, he might have realized that it wasn’t so bad after all. Horses, just like dogs and other flock animals, want to cooperate and like learning new things. If he could just have looked past the discomfort of the girth around his belly, slightly restricting his movements, he might have learned about all the fun things you get to experience as a horse, if you have the great luck to be trained by such an expert horseman as Jay. A whole new universe would reveal itself in front of you. Sometimes, stubbornness and fighting back is just a waste of time and harmful.
Am I that horse? Am I Victor, carrying around a damaging fighting instinct?
I’m sitting in the Geoscience building, its eight in the evening and I’m reading articles. I come here sometimes, when the coziness at the SRC becomes to tight. Here, the airiness comforts me. Or maybe it’s just the recognizable and old.
An old professor walks past, says “Lucky them” when I say that I’m doing my master’s at SRC now and I tell him that I feel that my geography background fits perfectly, that I’m thinking of doing my thesis on landscape change using remote sensing. He replies, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “Well, you can always come back and do your Ph.D. here, then”.
I wonder how I always manage to fool them. Hannah called me a superhero after I tool part in their group discussion on the thermokarst lake regime shift and I thought: I’m just bad at keeping my mouth shut. That doesn’t mean I’m trustworthy.
Around a streetlight in the distance, it looks like it’s snowing. I don’t think it is, though. It’s only me, wishing too hard.
Katja Malmborg 