I had never ridden a horse until today and I'm still not certain if I can call what I did today riding a horse. My wife, ever the adventurous one of our relationship, encouraged me to learn to ride while I was away. As a dutiful husband I accepted her challenge. So, I checked out where I could ride, got the phone number for the Arabian Equestrian Club off the internet, and called to get directions. Unfortunately, the woman on the other end of the line didn't speak any English, but I was nonetheless able to express my intentions and understand enough of her directions to get my taxi driver going in the right direction.
The whole experience of the day was humbling from the error-filled conversation I made with the Taxi driver whom I knew to be secretly plotting to extract extra cash out of me to the experience of falling flat on my face off my tiny horse--he didn't seem too tiny when I was on him. Nonetheless, I achieved my goal: I got to and from the distant equestrian stables, managed to ride a horse, and returned in one piece with most of my cash still in hand.
And at the end of the day, I can make a silly metaphor that I like to think is quite apropos: learning to ride a horse is not that different from learning to speak another language. For instance, you must master the animal and it can't master you. I naively thought that there would be some sort of symbiosis between man and animal--some Avataristic link between man and beast--in which our minds would become one. This was not the case. I quickly realized while awkwardly clinging to the reigns that the horse was going to do whatever it wanted to do unless I forced it to do what I wanted it do. That took knowing precisely the right commands to give the animal (something I was not particularly good at since my trainer didn't speak any English and my vocabulary knowledge was much more suited to carrying on conversations about politics and history rather than receiving instructions about the manner in which one pulls the reigns of a horse). I would point out that learning a language requires a similar approach. You don't just listen to a language as an adult for a few months and then poof, your mind melds with the language and thoughts begin to flow freely from your brain to your mouth. Rather, you master the language by learning the precise patterns required to formulate your thoughts into expressible and comprehensible phrases. All the while of course, you feel rather unsteady as I did on the back of that horse.
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| Me atop of my magnificent Arabian steed whom I like to call Hassan because that 's the Arabic word for horse. Also, I could call him Asskicker, because that's what he did to me, or Buttons, because that's just a really cool name. |
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| Me at the Roman theater in Amman built sometime around the reign of Marcus Aurelius. And no, the stadium is not built at a slant, apparently the kind Jordanian whom I asked to take my photo had never taken a picture from a camera that wasn't attached to an iPhone. |
Sometimes, you also just feel downright ridiculous as I did when my trainer and a group of bystanders laughed at me and made jokes at my expense. A person of my advanced age should know how to ride a horse some people may think just as many that I converse with in my broken Arabic must be shocked that I don't understand what they learned long ago, their mother tongue. And then there are those moments when you just get thrown off the back the horse--I'm fortunate the giant beast didn't step on me after I fell flat on my face. And when that happens, when your language breaks down and you can't hold on anymore, you just have to pick yourself up again, brush yourself off and hop back on the saddle.
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| Scenic Downtown Amman. |
I am humbled and humiliated everyday, and for some one that loves to be right all the time--as my wife can attest to--learning Arabic or trying to ride a horse has been a painful experience: it hurts to fall on your head about as much as your throat hurts from trying to pronounce all of those nasty voiced faryngeal fricatives of Arabic (I've heard of some Arabic learners sticking their fingers down their throats to activate their gag reflex so they know what their throat should do to pronounce one properly). I like to think, however, that pain and humiliation is just the thing we all need to grow. If I can quote Doogie Howser paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche, "What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger." And everything you do need to know, you can learn from Doogie's computer diary entries at the end of each episode. I hope you remember all those pithy entries.
