I've been exploring the idea of moving away from right/wrong checklist thinking about horsemanship, and instead noticing more nuanced instances of all sorts of different things in their specific context between a particular horse/human partnership.
I only have one horse now days, and Im an amateur doing all this stuff as a hobby in my spare time. So I'm not putting in the mileage to be discovering any fundamental truths or gaining expertise about horsemanship 'in general'. What I can do is develop greater skills in horsemanship 'in the specific' - I can become the expert on just my own pony and discover how best to do things for just the two of us <3
This could be a very unsteady, floundering, lost at sea thought for some people. "If there is no universal truth, how do I know which way to go?" etc etc. But I experience it as the opposite - because I'm no longer looking for the one ultimate right way to do/say/think/be, I can just do what works for the horse infront of me instead of getting bogged down in "shoulds".
I'm experimenting - I'm bouncing ideas off my pony and seeing how she responds. I've got a big toolkit and I'm trying different tools and seeing how my pony feels about each. I'm fucking around and I'm finding out. It's a hugely enjoyable, creative, collaborative, messy process. I learn more about my pony, she learns more about me, and we weave our way forward unencumbered by dogma, shame or preexisting expectations.