This past month, I studied abroad through Mizzou’s equine study abroad program at the Scottish National Equestrian Center in Scotland. I went in expecting to learn about horses. I didn’t expect to relearn how to slow down and actually enjoy my own life again. I arrived knowing absolutely no one, which meant starting completely from scratch; making friends with girls I’d met only days before, and learning to navigate an unfamiliar country with them by my side. That kind of navigating wasn’t always graceful. One day, a wrong turn on a hike turned into the long way up a mountain, and I ended up logging sixteen thousand steps in heels. Everyone was exhausted and a little defeated by the end of it, but we laughed about it eventually, and it taught me something I’ve carried with me since: things don’t have to go right for everything to still work out. Having to figure out a new place, new people, and new routines all at once, with no fallback plan and no one from home to lean on, pushed me to be more resourceful and more resilient than I realized I could be.

Once we got our footing, we started taking weekend trips and figuring those out from scratch was its own kind of lesson. None of us had any idea how to travel like this coming from the U.S., but we quickly learned that life abroad really can be simple: You can leave on a Friday and be back by Sunday, and do the whole thing on a budget. I took a train up to Inverness and into the Scottish Highlands, where I went bungee jumping off a bridge for the first time in my life. The next week, I made my way down to London with some of my new best friends to explore the city together. Closer to home, we hiked Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, a climb that had all of us huffing and puffing the whole way up. But reaching the top felt like a breath of fresh air, and we stood up there laughing and taking pictures, struck by how beautiful everything looked and by the simple fact that we’d just done something hard, together.

It was a train ride a few weeks later, though, around the third or fourth week of the trip, that really made everything click. My phone died four hours into a ride across the Scottish countryside: no music, no scrolling, nothing to distract me, just green hills, sheep, and my own thoughts for company. At first it felt like withdrawal. But somewhere around hour two, it turned into something closer to peace. I found myself actually looking out the window instead of glancing up between texts, thinking through things I hadn’t had the mental space to think about in months. By the time we pulled into the station, I realized I hadn’t been bored once, I’d just been present. It wasn’t the first moment of the trip that taught me that, but it was the one that made me realize how much had already been changing in me without my noticing.

The rest of the lesson came from slower, smaller places back at the center. In the middle of class, instructors would send us outside, lock the doors behind us, and tell us to go get a cup of tea, not as an inconvenience, but because they genuinely believed rushing was how things went wrong in the first place. Mornings meant all of us in the kitchen making breakfast together before anyone had even looked at a phone, and somewhere along the way I traded a seven-dollar latte habit for plain instant black coffee, which became one of my favorite parts of the day simply because it was simple.

And then there was the barn. Early mornings with the horses turned out to be some of the most grounding hours of the whole experience, there’s something about being around animals that settles you, and being around my friends while we mucked stalls, groomed and rode together built a sense of community I didn’t expect to find so fast, in a place I’d arrived at completely alone.

Looking back, the whole program was built around that idea: less textbook, more lived experience, and that’s exactly why it worked. I didn’t just learn about horses, I learned how to live peacefully, one tea break and one barn morning at a time. I learned how to make friends from nothing, how to find my way when I was lost, literally and otherwise, and how to be genuinely present instead of just passing through a moment. I came home with a phrase stuck in my head, loving life again, not a bigger life or a busier one, but the one that’s already right in front of me. I’m still figuring out how to hold onto that pace now that I’m back in the U.S., but Scotland gave me a version of myself I want to keep.

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: CAFNR: Equine Anatomy, Physiology and Fitness