ON THE LOSS OF A DOG

Christmas was going well. Lots of text messages with videos of the grandkids opening presents and lots of laughs on both sides of the family phone calls.

I took a moment to check on my Face Book friends and discovered a dear friend lost her dog.  The reason was a rare form of canine cancer, not treatable and not expected. I was devastated. I called her at the first moment I could and cried along with her because I know the depth of the feelings one goes to when they lose a dog.

I started to think about losing the several dogs throughout my life and how hard it was to absorb each one. I know losing a dog is the downside of having a dog. Everyone who has ever had a dog knows it is a price we will pay, but never plans for it and is devastated when it occurs.

Why is it? Why is it so hard? We always hear how having a dog in our life is the closest thing to having unconditional love. Maybe that is it. We will lose that love.  While I do agree, I also think it might be the reverse that makes a dog so special. It is the ability we have to give them “our” unconditional love, to love them with no restraints.

The idea of giving of ourselves to anyone is a very hard. Giving unconditionally is next to impossible. If we love someone and they disappoint us, it is hard to live with. If we buy something and it does not live up to expectations we are disappointed. Whatever we do and whoever we are with, to give ourselves unconditionally can be emotionally difficult. Unconditional means accepting an abnormal sense of vulnerability and none of us wants to be that out of control. We need, or we feel we need, at all times, to be protective of ourselves, especially our emotional selves.

Feelings are the true media to our life experiences. Feelings, good and bad, are what make us conscious of being alive. But we rarely allow ourselves to go too deeply into any of our emotions. We feel the need to protect ourselves from the disappointments, the failures, the risks and the potential emptiness. We hesitate trusting too many people. The more we isolate ourselves from real disappointment the better will be the outcome.

But what exactly is the full range of emotions? How high can they go, how deep? I think the range is incalculable. We do feel the highs of an emotion and love the sense of joy it gives us.  But if the height of the emotions we willingly go to means we will have to go to a corresponding depth then maybe we need to recalibrate our willingness to go to any excess at all.   Maybe the best course of action is to stay close to the line of emotional normalcy. Feel good about things, but not too good. Maybe then the feelings we have to endure on the downside might not be all that bad. At least we can hope so. 

I think this is where illegal drugs come in. Drugs keep us away from the depths of despair, give us a false sense of emotional high and simply keep us on an emotionally flat line so we can avoid really feeling anything, up or down. Drugs are artificial emotional leveling devices.  They breed a false sense of emotional normalcy without having to live with the consequences of honest, drug free feelings.

Which brings me back to dogs. Here is the true description of unconditional. We can and do love our dogs “unconditionally”. We accept the dog for what he or she is. Correspondingly she accepts us unconditionally for who we are. We don’t judge our dogs. They never judge us. They are not jealous, envious, or competitive and expect very little from us. They are unaware of our faults and accept us for whatever we give them.

If we are up, so is the dog. If we are down the dog comforts us. If we want to play, so will the dog. The dog will make us laugh, and allow us to feel joy just by watching what they do from one minute to the next. The dog does not get mad at us, does not hurt us, holds no grudges and does not have a mean bone in its body. With our dog we can simply let ourselves go and give everything we have to the dog.

As humans we love music, films, theater, books and most creative diversions because they are pathways into our emotions, safe pathways. They thrill us, scare us, and make us laugh and cry. We can feel retribution, success, jealousy, fear and anger. But all of the feelings we have are responsibility free. Nothing we felt was a result of anything we did. We experience emotions that are without consequence. We leave the theater, the playhouse, turn off the turntable with a sated emotional experience.  It is so much more preferable than actually being in a position where we experience those emotions as a result of our own actions.  That would be almost unbearable.

Not so with a dog. We love them.  We know we are all in. We hold nothing back. We protect nothing of ourselves with our dogs. We give them everything we are and expect nothing back. We don’t judge them from one day to another on how they speak to us. There is no tone of voice, no bad moods, no depression, only happiness. 

What a glorious feeling it is to be a human with a capacity to love, to give, to share and to feel the beauty of our emotions when in full bloom. Unfortunately as humans we constructed a world where we have to protect ourselves from giving those gifts too freely and unconditionally because of how we treat each other. We must protect ourselves or we might suffer. There is a huge risk in going all in on something or someone with no way back. Not with a dog.

Who is the loser when the gift of giving is such a rewarding human feeling but has to be monitored lest we go too far and have to pay an emotional price? US.

The gift of giving is the greatest gift we possess. The thought of giving ourselves unconditionally is so seductive yet seemingly so alien that it is one of our real life dichotomies.

Not so with our dogs. We give to them without ever thinking about it. It is the gift of giving that is so seductive.  . We are sharing ourselves with our dogs. They see us, accept us and love us in return.  

I think that is why it is so hard to lose a dog. When they go a part of ourselves goes with them, the part we love most about ourselves.  Will we ever be able to let ourselves go again? Will we ever feel the shared love again? I don’t know for sure but what I do know is we will never go deeper into the depths of despair as we do when we lose our dog.

     

MY NEW RESOLUTION

I have been quite dark for the past year. By dark I mean I have not posted much and simply watched as the world passed by. This has been a volatile world and one that begs for commentary and, of course, commentary is everywhere, but it has not been from me.  I intend to change that.

The focus of what I write will be on words: I like words. I like what they say and mean and how they are misinterpreted. I will focus on many words that I feel are no longer part of our everyday life and need to be if we are to continue to be a first class country. Here are a few examples: Sacrifice, responsibility, accountability, arrogance, hypocrisy, evolution, love, respect, empathy, greed, corruption. This is a good start. Some of the words will be presented in ways that one could count me as angry, with an axe to grind, a failure of using the words on my own behalf. But, they would be wrong. Yes I am angry. I am disappointed and I feel like so many others do, who are unaccounted for in the vote, the opinion polls and the direction we are taking as a country and as a society.

We are, or have become, crass. We bloviate, we lie, we use rhetoric as the truth, we are uncaring and we are selfish. A new word that has gotten a lot of traction this year is entitled. Where does anyone get the sense that they are entitled to something others are not. If what they have they earned, good for them. But does that success need to be at the expense of others who did not achieve such success? I say no. But that sentiment is out there and is becoming more pervasive as more people, even those without their own earned success feel entitled based on their gender, location, color, education etc. These are attributes and characteristics that are earned and in many cases are biologically given. They are not excuses nor reasons for feelings of superiority or rights of oppression over others.

I will also endeavor to cover the institutions that we all live with. They include all forms of government from DC to the local level, regulators, business organizations, Wall Street, religions and the IRS.

There is much to write about and I will get to it as soon and as often as I can. Please join me in sharing your commentary as I hope it will be you who I hope to represent on these pages.

Have a nice holiday and I will see you after Christmas.