My dog makes me a better person

We all know dogs are good for us. They make us healthier and happier, and let’s face it – dog hair adds glitter to everything we own. But lately I’ve realized that my dog is actually working on making me a better person.

Let me explain.

My dog is constantly asking me questions, if I just take the time to listen. “Can we play, Mum?” “Can we go for a walk together?” “Can I help you?” “Can I come with you?” “What are you doing?” “Do you love me, too?”

These questions, although maddeningly incessant, are beautiful things! And it’s important for me to stop and consider how I answer them, because I can only answer them with my body language towards him. I can’t throw an absent-minded ‘I love you too, buddy’ at him – he doesn’t know what I mean.  I need to make sure my answers are kind, loving, and deliberate. Because when they aren’t, I hurt him.

Let’s consider the following common scenario. I come home from work. I go to the kitchen to greet him and he bowls me over with joy. He is shouting with glee “Mom! Mom! You were gone forever! I thought I’d never see you again! But now you are back and it’s the BEST! DAY! EVER! Did you miss me too?” My reaction is everything to him.

Do I…

Reach down for a distracted pat on the noggin, while I scroll through Facebook to see what I missed that day in the office? That tells him that while I missed him, he isn’t really that important to me and I didn’t miss him that much.

Or, do I…

Roll around on the floor with him, giggling and petting him, giving and receiving kisses like I also thought I might never see him again, and that it truly is the BEST! DAY! EVER! and telling him over and over that of course I missed him, too! This reaction tells him, in the only language that he and I can truly share, that he is as much my world as I am his and I love every inch of his little furry being.

Every time I answer one of his questions, my behavior tells him something about how I feel about him. I always have options about how to answer his questions. But once I’ve answered, I can’t explain my reasoning to him, logically, in beautifully articulated English, so that of course he understands what I actually meant behind my distracted phone scrolling or TV tuning. Instead, my answer, whether I mean it or not, will tell him exactly what he means to me, in that moment.  And we all know that our dogs, unlike us, live absolutely and irrefutably in each single moment. Is the message I am giving him in that moment the one that I want him to have?

So every time I answer one of his questions, I think to myself – what do I want to tell him? Do I want to tell him that I am so glad he chose me on adoption day, and that every day with him is more precious than the last? Or do I want to tell him hang on, dude, let me see if someone has a better muffin recipe than I do on Pintrest, and then maybe we can sneak out to the mailbox for five minutes and back.

Now imagine if I took that amount of time and care to answer all the human questions around me. Imagine if we all did! If we were all always on point, engaged, and putting our best foot forward in all of our human interactions? Not distracted or multi-tasking, and counting on our shared understanding of the English language to explain away the bitter taste we might leave in each other’s mouths?

What a wonderful world it would be.

Read Full Post »

The currency of time

Wow. So, hi. It’s been awhile since I posted here… Ironic, then, that I now I find myself sitting at this keyboard, musing about the currency of time.

Like money; I only have a finite amount. Also like money, some of it is already spoken for. I need to work. I need to eat and sleep. But also like money, like disposable income… What about the rest of my time? What am I doing with it?

We are conditioned to think of time as infinite. We are programmed to believe that there will always be another sunrise, another sunset, another day to spend; and on that day,  we will be deliberate with our time. But some day, that luxury will be gone. Some day, we don’t know when, our time will be up. And we won’t say ‘I wish I had read one more Twitter feed’ or ‘I wish I had watched one more episode of Suits’.  Instead, we will lament lost and wasted time with loved ones, or dreams passed by in a flurry of due dates and endless to do lists.

When I say ‘I am too busy to do X’ what I am really saying is ‘I choose to spend my time on Y’ and that ‘X is not important enough to me’. Woah. Wait. Step back. Let’s really think about that statement.

Am I being that deliberate, about where and how I spend my time? Definitely not.

When my dog asks to play and I ignore him because I am scrolling through Instagram, do I mean to tell him that he is not important enough to me, to play? Of course not. But that is what I have done.

When I need to do yoga and clear my mind, but I ignore my yoga mat in favour of sending three more emails before bed, do I mean to tell my body and soul that they don’t matter, compared to those 3 emails? No. But that is exactly the message I have sent to my brain and my heart.

As I absentmindedly scroll through social media for the umpteenth time in a day or flick on a TV show just for the noise of it all, I am reminded that no – I am not being deliberate at all about where I am spending my precious and finite currency of time. I am, in fact, wasting it. Often. And as a dear friend reminded me today; you never get time back.

EVER.

Once it is spent, it is gone.

So I’m going to work on being deliberate. In my language, and in my actions. I will no longer say ‘I am too busy’ or ‘I do not have time’. I will say ‘I chose to spend my time doing X’ and ‘I choose not to spend my time doing Y’ as a verbal reminder of where I am spending this precious resource. I will use my time, deliberately and with care.

Because someday, I will have spent my last moment of time. And I want to know that I spent it deliberately and with care.

Read Full Post »