Dropping the can'ts, a love letter to a dog.
If you have ever skinned your knee or torn your ACL or woken up with a crick in your neck - that is, if you are human - you know pain. But something funny happens on the way to our brains. Instead of punctuation, pain can begin to feel like a sentence: something we will always have, a nagging reminder of ways we can't.
I see this in my clients (as well as myself and everyone I know) - how body discomfort narrows the horizon of possibility, and spins us into an irrefutable list of broken: We're injured, out of shape, pushing 40 (30, 70), we don't move this or that particular way, our bank account is low. For very good reasons, we feel circumscribed by what we see as the limitations of our bodies.
And then, I take my dog for a walk in the woods, and the whole lie is revealed.
More accurately, I take him on a little cross country ski expedition on the trails behind the dump in our small town and watch him transform into a fluid, joyful form.
Charlie is not a small dog. Or a young dog. He is a long-nosed, constantly shedding, 90 pound, Shepherd Collie mix. Nearly a decade into his life, his muzzle is graying, and when he lumbers across the yard, you can almost hear his joints creaking. Like most of us, he has spent the last few months curled up in a ball by the wood stove, waiting for spring.
But once in the woods, there is no lumbering. Charlie careens like a puppy. He is a streaking blur of movement and limbs. We encounter two other skiers, each with their own off leash dogs. One exclaims, "He's so big but...so playful!"
We marvel at him together.
He has a beautiful disregard for his size, his age, for mortality or limitation. He is himself - skimming along - a wordless, embodied creature
.... but not a linear one. At night, Charlie circles a million times before he comes to a flop in a big, graceless exhale. He isn't consistent either - barking wildly at the plastic bag that has blown across the lawn, but oblivious to the scratch scratch scratching of the mouse that wakes me in the night the one time I would like him to bark, to make some kind of exhortation and startle this vermin away and he... sleeps on.
When my daughter was 3 we ended up in the emergency room to treat her small, dislocated elbow. It was an excruciating experience, not being able to take away the pain she felt. But the doctor performed a quick osteopathic maneuver and - within minutes - she was laughing and playing with toys in the waiting room. Over it. The doctor said to me, "Children and animals aren't stupid like grown ups. They hurt when they hurt and then they don't when they don't. None of this trying to be better business, none of this worrying or pretending."
I remember this as I watch Charlie fly through the woods. There is something in that unpredictable, take-it-as-it comes careen that is a revelation. Given the chance to be outside, to be moving, to be with his people - the dog almost visibly hums with the joy of it all. True, the other 98% of the time he's laid out on his side by the fire, showing age in the way he moves. But he seems to say something else: Yes, I am achey and older, but also resilient. Perhaps this is the trick to health: to drop so fully into the present that the can't stories fall away.
Now if I could just get him to scare off that mouse.
