In riding a horse, we borrow freedom.

The line suggests that the sensation of liberty a rider feels is not wholly self-generated but temporarily “loaned” through partnership with another living being. “Borrow” implies both gratitude and responsibility: the horse’s strength, speed, and willingness create an experience of expanded agency for the human, yet that freedom is contingent on trust, training, and care. The quote also hints at a paradox—riding can feel like escape from constraint, but it depends on an animal whose own freedom is, in many contexts, limited by human use. Read this way, it becomes a compact meditation on interdependence and the ethics of deriving exhilaration from another creature’s power.