7:41 AM
As the squirrel ran along the back fence in our garden, Cocoa, our wonderful silver lab, went flying through the grass on a direct line for the rodent. She seems to take it as a personal affront that the squirrel runs with such impunity in her back yard, in her domain.
It leaped from the fence into a tree, and then waited until Cocoa had walked away, and then jumped onto the fence again.
I secretly think the squirrel is trolling our dog, as it repeated this action several times.
Each time Cocoa would watch with the intense focus that she displays for critters, delivery men and anything that could possibly turn into food (which by her definition is anything that anyone else is eating that they haven’t actually swallowed yet), and go running after it as fast as possible.
But there was one thing that was different this morning, and that difference really got me thinking.
She never barked.
Usually, she will run after that squirrel barking at the top of her lungs, growling and generally disturbing the peace.
But at this time, 7:41 am on a beautiful, warm, quiet Sunday morning, with the wind gently rustling the trees and me sitting on our porch swing in the garden, she was as silent as she could be. I wondered about this a lot, because it’s so completely out of character for her.
Was she, like me, just enjoying the peace and quiet of a quiet morning reflection?
I honestly don’t know how introspective a dog can really be, yet this was such a strange behavior for her. I tried to understand what could have possessed her to remain silent, because she’s not normally one to hold her tongue, especially not when there’s a squirrel involved. As I sat in quiet wonder, it occurred to me that she is far more attuned to the world than I give her credit for.
And maybe, I can learn something from her.
Because she always seems to know when we are going out, as a family. Even though we try to behave very nonchalant, giving her no clues, if we are going out as a family and we’re not taking her, she’ll go into her kennel, lay down, and stare at us in hopes that a large bone will soon be arriving in her future. There’s something that she senses that we are apparently completely unaware of.
Because we trust so much to our logic, our communication, and our vaunted human judgment.
And yet, for most of the life on this planet, they get by without it. The squirrel doesn’t use trigonometry or calculus to determine its flight path when jumping from the fence to the tree. The birds that fly in and out of our yard do not understand Bernoulli’s principle of flight, nor have advanced degrees in aeronautics.
They just simply ‘know’ and do.
We humans are those blessed and cursed with awareness of what we do and don’t know, and allow ourselves to be constrained and controlled by our feelings of doubt, disbelief and disability.
When sometimes, we should just go with what we know, and find joy in what we can.
Because ultimately, the quality of your life is not determined by how much you have, or what you have achieved, but about how you feel. The person who has little but is happy is far wealthier than the person who has much, but is miserable.
I think sometimes my dog has a much happier life than I do, because at 7:41 in the morning, she was just loving life, chasing a squirrel, and taking her own form of joy from a quiet moment of life, lived in a manner that makes her happy.
May we all experience such joy, and share it with those we meet.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings