A burden of these years is to allow all the stereotypes of old age to hold me back. To hold me down. To stop the flow of life in me.

A blessing of these years. Is that they give me the chance to break the bounds of a past life. And to create for myself, a life more suited to what I now want to be.

This is a quote from the book, The Gift of Years, Growing Older Gracefully, by Joan Chittister.

• Do you want to be able to ride for years into the future?
• Do you want your horse to be healthy for years into the future?
• Do you want to be able to care for your horse as you get older?
• If you can’t ride for some reason, would you like to be able to remain involved with horses?
• If for some reason you can’t care for your horse, to you want your horse to go to a good home where she’ll be loved and appreciated for the rest of her life?

If your answers are "yes" then you may be interested in what I'm calling Future Horsemanship.

Many of us set our schedules and build our task list for the day based on what other’s need done rather than what we need to do for ourselves. We never seem to have enough time to exercise, train our horses, ride as much as we’d like or need to, and develop horsemanship goals based on what we’d like to be able to do a year from now or five years from now.

With Future Horsemanship, we’ll set goals for exercising to build the strength and fitness we need to ride our horses for years to come. We’ll set goals to work with our horses to build their fitness and train them to be horses that would win friends wherever they go. We’ll set goals to develop our horsemanship to enable us to work with our horses for years into the future. All of these goals drive the habits we form today to achieve those horsemanship goals in years ahead.

Future Horsemanship will be one of the topics we’ll cover in Senior Horsemanship.

As I mentioned last week, I want to better prepare for the possibility that I might have to give up my horses. Or that one or more of them might outlive me. I have three horses and they're all different. But their prospects for a good life following me could be improved if I take the time to train them to be easier to handle, easier to ride and easier to care for.

As one of my Future Horsemanship goals, I plan is to do a series of videos, demonstrating my training progress and problems with these horses. The videos will help me share my experiences with you. And they also document where these horses are in their training — what they know, what they can do, and what they have issues with doing. Those videos should be very helpful in finding my horses good new homes if they ever have to be moved from my care.

Thank you for listening!