Run Toward It: What the Year of the Horse Means for Travel and Black Women Right Now

The Year of the Snake ended on February 16, so last week marked a moment of shedding. I personally realized I had been doing exactly that. I sold my house in July 2025, packing up a version of myself and a version of stability I thought would last longer. I was laid off from my job in October 2025, a shedding I had actually prayed for in May 2025. And just before the official Lunar New Year, I let go of a relationship that no longer felt aligned on February 11, 2026. One by one, these were layers I was shedding, which were tied to my ideas of security, routine, and attachment. By the time the Year of the Horse arrived this week, I felt like I was standing in open space. And open space, while sometimes scary, is meant for running forward, different from feeling lost or running in any random direction.

There are years for planting and years for waiting.

There are years for careful planning and then years for running forward with those plans.

In the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Horse carries the energy of fast and instinctive motion. Horses don’t thrive in small enclosures. They are built for open land and movement.

Many of us, especially Black women, are finding ourselves removed from systems that once defined our stability. We’re being laid off, pushed out, intentionally overlooked and burned out.

The doors are closing in our faces, but in an attempt to reframe our thinking, maybe that isn’t the worst thing for us.

What Is the Year of the Horse?

The Chinese zodiac operates on a 12-year cycle, each year represented by an animal that carries distinct traits and symbolic meaning. The Horse is associated with freedom, independence, confidence, strength, and speed. It represents movement, ambition, charisma, and a desire for open horizons.

The Horse is not chaotic but rather powerful, strategic, and aware. Horses know when to sprint and when to pace themselves. Maybe most importantly, horses understand that space, not confinement, is survival.

How Does This Relate to Travel?

Travel is movement with intention.

As Psychology Today shares, 82% of travelers say their experiences abroad improved their ability to solve problems and make decisions. The outlet also points to research connecting travel with greater cognitive flexibility, emotional expansion, and self-discovery, suggesting that movement quite literally reshapes the mind.

When you board a flight to visit a new city or country, you are reminding yourself that the world is bigger than the rooms and people that have rejected you or couldn’t see your value.

If February 2026 is the start of a year defined by motion, it may not be in our best interest to be physically stagnant. The Horse energy invites us to move, to loosen our grip on fixed expectations, and to ask:

Where else could I go?

Travel is expansion and new perspective that translates to a refusal to let a single system define our worth.

For solo travelers especially, we thrive on this familiar energy. Booking a flight without waiting for someone else. Navigating a city alone. Eating dinner solo.

That is the energy this year is pushing us toward.

The Shifting Workforce for Black Women

Black women are being laid off at disproportionate rates. Diversity roles are dissolving. Emotional labor is uncompensated.

The truth is many of us are overqualified and therefore overperformed in systems that were never meant for us and that never protected us, and now the layoffs have pushed us to adjust in ways we may not have ever considered.

The Year of the Horse encourages a new heart and mind posture.

Usually, when the stable door closes, horses do not beg to be let back in. They take off running.

So this moment, uncomfortable as it is, can also be our most powerful repositioning.

Travel during transition is not completely irresponsible, and we should not be guilted into that thought pattern. Travel can be the clarification we need. It naturally gives us time and space to expand our imaginations beyond the job titles we’ve lost. New and unfamiliar places can introduce you to people, ideas, and possibilities that didn’t exist inside your previous environment.

Sometimes you need to see and experience another place to remember you are not and never were stuck. Sometimes you need to hear another language to remember that even though your voice is different, it still matters.

Travel Is Our Repositioning

There’s a difference between running away and running toward.

For Black women, travel can be an opportunity for us to reconnect to the diaspora. To our ancestors and their teachings and ways of life. To spaces where we are not the minority. To rooms where everything about us, including our presence, is not analyzed.

Our story did not begin with the workplace. Our ancestors were moved across continents by force, so movement is not new to us, but reclaiming movement as freedom is. We are allowed to expand.

What We Can Take From the Horse This Year

1. Move before you feel fully ready. No one is ever fully ready.

Perfection is not a prerequisite for momentum. You do not need a completed five-year plan to take the first step.

2. Protect your energy.

Horses are powerful, but they also know how to pace themselves. This is not about sprinting yourself into another burnout. It’s about choosing movement that energizes you and revives your passions.

3. Claim wide spaces.

Horses thrive in open landscapes. Find environments that feel expansive. That might be international travel. That might be creative entrepreneurship. That might be community building with people who look and think like you.

4. Refuse confinement.

If a job, relationship, or environment shrinks you, the Horse reminds you that containment is not your destiny. You were built for more than that.

This Is Not a Year to Shrink

You may not control layoffs. You may not control economic shifts. You may not control who chooses to see your value.

But you can control your movement. You can control your willingness to explore. You can control whether you interpret transition as rejection or redirection.

Let this be the year we stop apologizing for our existence and our needs. Maybe this is the year we run toward something bigger than the systems that were built to contain us.

The landscape is wide, and we are not meant to be still in it. Run forward.