Everything is Terrible, So I Got a Puppy
Here’s a slightly terrible fact. The truth is that I was never a dog person. Not even remotely. Dogs? I didn’t get it at all. Every time a girlfriend had a dog — I’d run for the hills.
But don’t worry — this isn’t going to be an essay just about dogs, and how wonderful they are (they are, though, I mean, come on.) It’s going to be one about what I’ve learned from my little buddy (that’s him, above) in the first month I’ve had him, about life, now, and the point of us — what you might learn, too — which are some pretty amazing lessons, at least to me.
So. There I am. So not a dog person. One day, my partner’s dad got sick — and she was overwhelmed with work. So I stepped in to take care of him recuperate after an operation. He’s a classic American, of the old school. A farmer’s son who became a CEO. A self-made success. I see in him all the things that are — were? — great about America, to use a notorious phrase. Humility, gentleness, wisdom, kindness. The money never went to his head. He lives on the same house in the same cul-de-sac where he had his first kid. That kind of American Dream. I respect that immensely. So we became, strangely enough, fast friends, me and this red-blooded Republican, who walks out every morning and feeds the deer in the backyard.
One day, while he was sick, I was walking down the stairs in that little house on the cul-de-sac, bleary eyed, drowsy. And zooming up the stairs at me was a…puppy. A puppy who was delighted, excited, exuberant. Me? I was startled, baffled, and irritated. What the? “Where,” I asked him sternly, finding him sitting on the sofa downstairs, “did this puppy come from?” I was already taking care of one person. But a dog? I don’t do dogs. He laughed gently.
I almost thought, for just a moment, maybe he was even trying to teach me something, in a way that was wiser than I could grasp, gentler than I knew. But I couldn’t complete the thought. “Do you wanna take him for a wallk?”, he asked, in his slow, gentle drawl, an amused grin curling his lips upwards.
I sighed, exasperated. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I was busy, busy, busy. Things to write. People talk to. Big ideas to wrestle with. Me? But who else was going to walk this dog? A little tiny Yorkie, by the way, staring up at me with big brown eyes, expectant, still, just quivering with barely contained excitement.
So on came the leash. And off we went. And, my friends, that very day, something changed, despite me wanting not to change.
I couldn’t say why. But walking this little dog was a kind of magic. The most quietly, strangely intense thing I’d done in ages. Yes, really. I thought walking a dog was…just walking. But it was something much more like communicating, relating, discovering, sharing, knowing, feeling. It was as true as a summer day. The little guy was trying, I saw, to show me all his favourite places. This mailbox, that lamp post, this patch of earth. And not a single word had to be spoken. Nothing had to be said. What the? After that, the little guy followed me around me everywhere. He stayed up with me all night. He became my best friend for a week. And I was surprised to find myself becoming his friend too.
Forgive me if this is obvious to you. I’m sure many of you know it well. And yet I wonder — do we ever stop to investigate the meaning of these feelings? Don’t you think that friendship is one of the things missing from the world most today? Maybe you’re beginning to see my point.
Fast forward a year. I’ve been dying, since that week, to get a puppy. Everyone makes fun of me. The tough guy, the intellectual, the real life vampire in the leather jacket…wants a puppy?! LOLLL.
One day, my partner surprises me. She comes home with a tiny white puppy, tufts of fur going every which way. Big black eyes are poking out, afraid, from a head the size of a tennis ball. “This is Snowy,” she says. “Snowy!!” I say, slightly terrified. Now I have a puppy. What the hell am I going to do with him?
As it turns out, the real question was what he was going to do with me. That first week was hellish, and yet it’s one of the favorite weeks of my life. Snowy, this little tiny thing, wasn’t sure. Was this his home now? Were we his family? It took a while. A while full of barks, yips, pleading whines, chewing everything, making messes everywhere.
And then, one day, it was like we were a family. Before I knew it, we had a little routine. Wake up, breakfast, dog park, playing with friends, coming home, napping, and so on. What the?
What had happpened? I’ve told you this long, maybe overly sentimental story for a reason.
Snowy was a baby when we got him. And he wasn’t even a human baby. Just a baby. And yet he had exactly the same three traits that all human beings are born with. Empathy, curiousity, and the need to relate, to love. I’d call all this innocence. And in Snowy I see a kind of fierce, impossible innocence burning like a supernova. But that innocence is in us, too. Maybe you think this is obvious, pointless, or useless — so let me come to my lesson.
How is it that the three fundamental qualities we’re born with are the very ones that end up missing in us? Aren’t those three things exactly what’s missing from our world? From our societies, democracies, polities, ways of life? Empathy, innocence, curiousity? How is it that a tiny puppy has them — but we somehow lost them?
Snowy is so brimming over with empathy that if someone starts crying on TV — he perks up, barks, tries to warn us something’s wrong. He’s so full of curiousity that every tree, every flower, ever inch of grass, is like an undiscovered country, rich with knowledge. And he’s so electric with concern, with love and needing to be loved, that everyone he meets can be his friend.
Now think about us. You and me. We’ve somehow been made to be the polar opposite, haven’t we? Where exactly do you see empathy around these days? It’s in such short supply that an empathy deficit is a feature of modern life. We want to deny, more and more, others the very things that we aspire to — even basics like healthcare and retirement. What kind of way to live is that? Nor do we have much curiousity. We aren’t interesting in the great lessons of history, the world, or our own mistakes anymore — we think we know everything there is to know.
What about concern, about love and being loved, that strange and beautiful capability Snowy has to be friends with everyone he meets? We don’t have that, do we? Mostly, we hope to get our ways through rage, anger, violence. What are those ways, anyways? Getting our way means we hope to gain more money, sex, and power, basically — more than the next person, anyways, so we can feel superior. We live narrow, self-absorbed, and petty lives.
And yet these three things — empathy, curiosity, and concern — are the fundamental principles of civilization, my friends, in the most concrete way. Yes, really. No curiosity? No empathy? No concern? No investment in each other. And that would have meant no aqueducts, roads, universities, town squares…no democracies…no progress All of humanity’s greatest accomplishments would simply never have happened if our predecessors had lived the selfish, greedy, petty, foolish lives we live now. If you think I’m overstating it, ask yourself how many hours a day the average person spends on Facebook, versus, say, thinking about climate change. I get it. It’s not easy. Who wants to care after capitalism’s beaten the life out of you, made you work 18 hours a day just to stand still? But that is very much the point.
How is it that a tiny puppy has the three things that we, us adult human beings, who so often imagine ourselves to be, as a species, all-powerful, don’t — empathy, curiosity, concern? Just like my little puppy, these are the three things we’re born with. They define us. There is not a single human child ever made who was born without these things — no matter how ill, frail, or broken. They are our nature.
And so the truth is that something badly wrong in our world, my friends. My tiny puppy can live according to his nature, but we can’t. My puppy can show endless empathy, concern, and curiosity — but when you or I do the same thing, we are punished for it.
Who punishes us? Who doesn’t. Imagine that you show empathy at work, or real curiosity, or concern for anything but money. What happens to you? Bang! You’re done. People will gossip and whisper. They’ll call you weak and soft and a liability. And sooner or later the axe will fall.
In other words, our institutions, our ideologies, exist in stark contradiction to our nature, which is fundamentally empathic, curious, and loving. You don’t have to look further then a puppy to see it.
What’s the result of living according to your nature — and not living in denial, in contradiction of it?
Take Snowy. When he can express empathy, curiousity, and concern — he’s happy. When he goes to the park, and he plays with the other dogs, they tumble and fall and dart. They laugh and roar. They are discovering one another — and they are discovering themselves. When one of them goes too far — they know it. They grow concerned. And so it goes.
Snowy is happy when he lives according to his true nature. In other words, empathy, curiousity, and concern are how happiness is made, how it comes into being, how it’s had. But when he can’t live according to his nature — then it’s another story. That first week, he was afraid to express empathy, curiosity, concern. He didn’t feel safe yet. He was anxious. It took a great deal — much more than I thought — to teach him he was loved. He was worried for self-preservation, in other words. But the paradox is that worrying over self-preservation, while it’s our first priority, is also our lowest need — happiness is our highest, and that only comes from being allocentric, other-focused. Empathy, concern, curiosity, remember?
And that’s just what’s gone wrong with our world, too. We’re so desperately worried about self-preservation, individually, that it’s become our first — and only priority. Who has room to care about the planet? Democracy? The future? Society? When capitalism is taking everything from you faster than you can even keep track of? When you’re barely making ends meet, even after a lifetime of hard work, of playing by the rules, of doing the right thing — and all you’ve gotten is abused, preyed on, when you’re not being neglected by your institutions?
That situation — individual self-preservation becoming a global obsession — is very real, because increasingly, we are all fighting one another for slices of a shrinking pie. Incomes are stagnant in the rich world. In countries like China and India, they’re not keeping pace with the cost of living. Middle classes aren’t booming. They’re struggling — or, as in America and Britain, imploding.
As a result, empathy, curiosity, and concern are in sharp, steep deficit — they’re plummeting. I applaud you if you still have them — but the truth is that as a world, we are running short of these things. They are being replaced with what defines this decade. Anger, rage, violence, greed, stupidity, folly, self-inflicted catastrophe. American fascism, British nationalism, European extremism, Chinese authoritarianism.
We aren’t a happy world my friends. We are an increasingly bitter, enraged, and angry one. And that is because we aren’t living according to our nature, my friends — or, more accurately, we aren’t allowed to, even though a puppy can. Our institutions and ideologies won’t let us. They reward us for being predators, and say only the strong deserve to survive, while the weak should perish. Whether capitalism, supremacy, or patriarchy. But that denies us our three most essential qualities, empathy, curiousity, concern. As a result, we are never really happy. We are at best relieved from our pain, or maybe numbed to our distress. But genuine happiness grows more distant by the day. Yet how could it be any other way? Happiness comes from living according to your nature — and we aren’t allowed to.
And if we want to build a future worth living in, my friends, perhaps it’s there that we should begin. With creating organizations — societies, countries, cities, worlds, companies — where people aren’t punished for empathy, curiosity, and concern, but encouraged and allowed to express them in endless, creative, and expansive ways. Perhaps we begin by building worlds where first of all, we can finally live according our true nature, which is gentle, kind, warm, loving. Instead of ones that punish for being who we trust are.
I’ve tried to build a little life for Snowy where he can live according to his nature. Where he’s never punished for being who he truly is. Where he can express all the empathy, curiosity, and concern that roars through his tiny body like a mighty river. That river of grace, my friends, is the place that we need to step back into.
To me, Snowy is a little thing. But you and I are little things to the universe. We are dust on a rock lit by a flame, hurtling through the endless darkness. Innocence is our nature — it is the nature of all life. And if we have made a world guilty of so much — of neglect, of abandonment, of violence, of greed, so much so that even while the planet burns, we laugh, averting our eyes — it’s only because we seem to have forgotten who we truly are, and always were. The river of grace flows through us all, my friends. Even a little puppy. Even you and me. And the challenge of this century is finding our ways back to its shores.
Umair
May 2019
Everything is Terrible, So I Got a Puppy
Research & References of Everything is Terrible, So I Got a Puppy|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments