A `door' has been defined as something your dog is always on the wrong side of. That also may be a working defini-tion of your dog's leash—something you always seem to be on the wrong side of! We want to go here; Mr. MacStubborn wants to go there; we want to move along, Ms. MacTarryer insists on savoring every olefactory essence of every blade of grass three times over! And if by dint of training we've managed to get beyond tugs-o-war with our dogs, the leash and the walk remain for many Scottie owners yet another task to cram into already busy days.
I'm discovering, however, new ways to approach the routine of the Scottie walk. This discovery puts a new `leash' on life with dogs, re-enchants a chore, and even lowers blood pressure!
It's easy for us who love Scotties to romanticize them and their benefits to our health, but the rest of the story is they can add considerable stress to our lives precisely because of their strong self-will. But dogs of character and chores of walking do not have to be negatives. I'm discovering that Scottie willfulness which leads to tugs-o-war can also introduce me to deeper meanings within walking rituals, meanings which are helping this Scottie lover nurture silence in a noisy heart.
Demons of the Walk
Truth is, it is not our Scotties who are the demons of the walk. The real demons are noises inside ourselves revolving around three obsessions: obsession with ego, obsession with the clock, and a compulsion to gloss. The beginning of wisdom in transforming your dog walks is recognizing at which end of the leash the real `problems' lie.
The demon of ego is a familiar obsession to most of us. My schedule, my deadlines, my agenda, my priorities, my will—they all add up to sensibilities tuned into oneself and tuned out from everything else. Trouble is selfism renders everything around us including our Scotties a distraction, an impediment, a source of conflict. That is a great loss because our Scotties are Life's invitation to break out of the cycle of self-absorption, to get outside ourselves for refreshing encounter with the natural world. The problem is we're too self-preoccupied to act on the invitation.
Obsessing over time is the second demon of the walk. Like Louis Carroll's Rabbit in Alice In Wonderland, we are the time-poor whose lives shout, "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date!" Time is the scarcest of resources in day-planner-lives and that means even when we take a break from the tyranny of the urgent we can't enjoy it because we feel guilty. Our Scotties, who haven't the slightest clue as to the meaning of a calendar or a schedule, could teach us much about the joys of life off the clock. But our internal compulsions get in the way rendering us edgy and stressed-out companions. Once again, the demon of the walk is not the dog at the end of the leash, nor is it the watch on our wrist; the demons are within.
Our compulsion to gloss is less familiar than demons of ego and the clock but it is a
nemesis to dog walks just the same. What I'm getting at is our habit of looking without seeing, of hearing without listening, of encountering without truly engaging. In our rush to get on with life we gloss over experiences without savoring them. The outcome is another dog walk which had the potential of genuine refreshment to our spirit but which instead is relegated to yet another frenetic chore.
These, then, are demons of the walk: ego, which sets us up for conflict, the clock, which drives us to rush rather than linger, and sensory glossing, which blurs detail and sacrifices enchantment.
What can we do to reframe our dog walks? How can we quell our own demons so that walking our dog becomes a mini-retreat for our spirit? I have found a way.
Zen of the Walk
In 1974 Philosopher Robert Pirsig rode his motorcycle across the country and wrote a modern classic called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book voiced a groundswell critique of materialism and redefined "success" as something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble.
In the spirit of Pirsig's book I'm proposing that Scottie ownership is more than getting a good dog and staying out of trouble. I'm saying that walking your dog in particular can be, as Japanese thought teaches, a path of enlightenment. I am discovering simple motions of the spirit which when practiced during walks with my Scotties reduce stress and blood pressure and transform mundane actions into mini-vacations for the soul.
Standing Apart
The first of the motions of the heart which transform walks into mini-retreats is standing apart.
This is a metaphor for mental distancing that promotes perspective. By standing apart we view the conflicts of the moment more objectively, with less ego, and reappraise the whole with less awfulizing.
We need perspective in our lives. We badly need a fresh sense of who we are, of where we've come from, and what it means to be us. We need perspective on which things truly matter in our lives and which are trivial. Trouble is, our daily-planner-lives are spent up to our armpits in alligators and when we're fighting alligators it is gator teeth on our back side that move us, not quest for perspective!
Standing apart when you walk the dogs is a quiet way to drain the swamp and get away from the alligators by renewing connection to what is central in your universe. Your dogs live serenely away from swamps and alligators of the mind. Why not join them if only for a few minutes? Standing apart with your Scotties—apart from cares and worries, apart from problems to solve and deadlines to meet—can be a mini-vacation for your spirit.
Backing Off
The second quiet motion of the heart which nurtures dog walks as retreats for your spirit is backing off.
This is the mental discipline of reducing your own competitiveness, of silencing your need to control, of letting go of your demand to have the first and the last word.
When we stand apart and back off in our dog walks we may be amazed how much psychological and relational garbage in human relations we transfer to our dogs. Anger, frustration, worry, and stress which have been building all day on the job get re-directed at unsuspecting Scotties. The leash in hand becomes surrogate of the control we lack over the boss, the problem, or the deadline which vex us—and we tighten our grip instead of relaxing it.
That is a double jeopardy, to our dogs and to ourselves. The mind-set of controlling requires us to be hard, tough, and rigid. By contrast, the wisdom of the East teaches:
Markings in dry clay disappear
Only when the clay is soft again.
Scars upon the self disappear
Only when one becomes soft within.
Our Scotties are Life's invitation to rethink obsession with control and our walks can be mini-occasions to practice silencing hostile voices we carry around in our heads. In the greater scheme of things we don't have to have the last word; we don't always have to be in control.
Quiet walks with Scotties who adore us can be safe occasions for backing off compulsions to control life. They can become refreshing times for nurturing the healing that follows softening within.
Turning Aside
The third of the disciplines which transform dog walking into a mini-retreat for the spirit is my favorite—turning aside.
This action requires fine-tuning our senses and granting ourselves permission to be spontaneous.
Scotties do this instinctively. My dogs can be walking along with decided purpose and suddenly make a hard right angle turn that seems to defy physics. They've caught the scent of something that simply must be thoroughly investigated! We pour over our e-mails; dogs pour over their pee-mails. Every blade of grass is an encyclopedia to them, every bush or post or tree a bulletin board. They know instinctively what comes hard to us—the pleasures of turning aside.
Near the end of Nati's life, the Scottie who inspired Great Scots Magazine, as she grew slower and more senile, we took walks by ourselves without the other dogs. By
the end our walks were little more than the half-block to the corner and back. I used to tell her she needed a speed-reading course because she pondered so long over each scent. Today I'm less sure her lingering was because of impaired synapses in her brain. In the shadow of the end, lingering is the natural choice.
How much of life we miss by not lingering! The hidden cost of the fast lane is loss of the enchantment of turning aside. In Christian scripture Moses turned aside to contemplate the burning bush and God revealed himself to him (Exodus 3:3). What `burning bushes' have we missed in our haste? Elizabeth Barrett Browning verbalized my point best when she wrote:
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries
And daub their faces unaware.
Walking our dogs is the perfect time to follow their lead by turning aside to see in more detail what is around us, to listen as never before. It may be a sunrise or sunset that catches our eye. It may be a plant, an animal, a child. If you will allow them, your dogs will teach you to do more of the very things one 80-year-old man listed as wishes if he could live his life over:
" . . . I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones. You see, I am one of those people who lives prophylactically and sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I've had my moments; and if I had it to do over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead each day . . . If I had it to do over again, I would go places, do things, and travel lighter than I have."
Turning aside from the turbulent stream of life can nurture silence in your noisy heart. Your Scotties are an open invitation to do just that.
Breaking Out
Finally, there is the motion of the spirit I call breaking out. This is the opportunity on our dog walks to break free from the plodding routine of learned roles, behaviors, and expectations. It is opportunity to make this moment with these dogs in this place different.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of our life in the fast lane is our atrophied capacity to fully inhabit any space. No matter what we're doing we're always mentally or emotionally somewhere else. We call it "multi-tasking" but it cashes out to mean that we never fully attend to anything. Having structured our world around mandatory attention-deficit-disorder we wonder why the magic has gone out of our lives.
The greatest gift our dogs offer us is opportunity to break out of our usual sensory deprivation. Walks with them can become mini-retreats during which we taste what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls "really inhabited space." This means for precious moments in our lives we are truly present, we actually see and listen, we really inhabit a place by opening ourselves to receive what it has to offer and by giving back our undivided attention.
In multiple ways our Scotties shout out to us for exactly that kind of attention. So does Life.
But we must break out of learned deafness to hear, we must break out of what Plato described as the "cave" of our ordinary existence to see the light.
The quiet motion of the spirit I've called breaking out is the path we can follow.
Conclusion
There is more to life with Scotties than struggling over the right and wrong side of doors and leashes. At deepest levels the simple act of walking our dog turns out to be invitation to enlightenment.
We do not have to climb an exotic mountain or wait for the quintessential vacation to recharge our souls. We can replenish the wells of our hearts right where we are in our own neighborhood with the dogs we love.
By nurturing four quiet motions of the spirit—standing apart, backing off, turning aside, breaking out—we can follow our canine best friends to fresh enchantments that lead to mini-retreats for our spirit.
©2002 Tartan Scottie. Reprinted from Great Scots Magazine Vol 7 No 4, July/August 2002. |
