It is a wonderful reminder that dogs and cats are happy because they don’t get caught up in painful thoughts of the past or worries about the future. They just are. In one strip, a little critter is whining to his dog buddy, “I was thinking of ALL my problems. I was thinking of ALL the pain of the past and...I was thinking of ALL the uncertainty of the future. And I was thinking poor, poor me---my sad life. And then I was thinking how LITTLE time there is...and I’m really thinking it’s all just...hopeless. What can I do?” He puts his head in his paws and begins to cry. Almost shrugging, the dog looks at him and says, “Shtop thinking.”
Indeed.
Tolle also imparts a great message about learning how to celebrate life by being completely present with it, like a dog when he’s out on a walk fills his entire being through his senses. Through living in the moment, and that moment alone, a dog will wring all of the possible pleasure from it, unencumbered by what has occurred even 5 minutes before. In another strip, a man and his pup are out jaunting along the shoreline. The man says, “Earl, it is so nice to get away from it all!” The puppy looks nonplussed, and thinks, “I guess...although I don’t have that much of an ‘all’ to get away from.”
My swirling, bouncing puppy can leap 3 feet in the air at the mere idea of food. The same food he’s had morning, noon, and night for the past 10 days. He can derive fits of joy from a biscuit that’s no bigger than the top of my finger. And he can entertain himself for 15 minutes straight with an empty yogurt container.
After he eats a meal (which lasts all of about 15 seconds), he comes and finds me in the house, then launches into a fit of tail-wagging so vigorous that his entire lower half dusts the floor like a mop. This morning when we first woke up, he was so thrilled to hear the sound of my voice that he ran over, curled up next to my hand, and began to lick every square inch of it with the force of his love and admiration. Gone from his mind were all the ways I had frustrated his desires, the day before, when I'd left him in his crate and he'd bellowed at the top of his lungs, all the ways my goals and desires intersected with his not at all. He had dismissed those within minutes after their occurrence. And with the dawning of a new day, all was forgotten, forgiven, and better yet, celebrated! Dogs seem to have hard-wired in their brains that the key point to life is, first and foremost, to love with all your heart.
And in some ways, we make it utterly easy for them. Often, domesticated canines have a primo gig. Someone feeds and protects them, and they don’t have to make a living. They don’t have customers yelling at them and breakups that tear them apart and clinical depression that decks them. And they don't feed their own misery by sitting around listening to Amy Goodman or bleak NPR reports from Kabul. Sure, they're less complex. But one of the many reasons we’ve chosen them as companions is that they bring us back to the essentials: how fun it is to play, how satisfying it can be to eat a great meal, how good it feels to give your body a nice long stretch, how relaxing it is to take a nap after a big, healthy walk.
As Tolle puts it, “What is it that so many people find enchanting in animals? Their essence—their Being—is not covered by the mind, as it is in most humans. And whenever you feel that essence in another, you also feel it in yourself.”
Thank you, Hobie (and Eckhardt, and Debi) for reminding me of all of this.
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