I have been hurtling towards another birthday and, although I can’t be sure they’re related, a renewed interest in meditation, mindfulness and yoga has featured more prominently in my life.
‘I always imagined ‘Downward Facing Dog’ to be a straightforward pose,’ I tell my daughter.
She looks at me and shakes her head.
I begin to ponder on the possibility that the rather indelicate phrase, ‘shaking like a shitting dog’ emanated originally from someone witnessing an attempt to hold that particular yoga pose for more than about three seconds.
I’m self-aware enough to know that at least a part of my enthusiasm for self-care is related to the relentless speed at which the years seem to pass.
It was during mindfulness training for therapists some years ago that a stranger asked me,
‘How often do you think about death?’
Having not thought about it previously I realised that I think about it most of the time.
Mindfulness and meditation require that we remain in the present moment, resisting the temptation to allow our minds to wander forward and back. As hard as that is, there is a perpetual model available to help all dog owners see how it’s done.
Dogs are great opportunists and are, as far as I can see, interested only in what is happening right now.
Daisy’s best dog friend before Nelly came along was always Flynn. Theoretically, Flynn belongs to my sister but everyone who knows him realises it’s actually the other way around.
Rescue dogs can be a handful because we have no idea what they’ve experienced before they came into our lives.
One of my sister’s other rescues is a stone-cold killer, a result of having been left to run wild and forage for herself when abandoned as a young pup. When she attacked a swan I wondered if my sister might end up in The Tower Of London.
Flynn, wouldn’t chase anything, other than a sandwich.
If there’s a dog more food-oriented, I don’t want to meet him, and it’s an obsession that has caused all manner of painfully embarrassing experiences that are only amusing from the distance afforded by time.
He’s taken apples and packets of crisps out of people’s hands as he wanders past them, he’s plundered picnics, and at one time became so fond of stealing the lunch of unsuspecting fishermen that my sister had to make sure she had money on her to offer payment for replacement along with her humble apologies.
When Daisy was younger Flynn would frequently sniff a rotten fish somewhere on the river bank and lead her towards it where she’d roll on her back on top of the decaying carcass with glee making for a distinctly unpleasant walk home.
Flynn is a dog in the moment.
Once, when one of my sister’s dogs crawled beneath a fence and got stuck on a ledge high up on some cliffs, Flynn went to save him and got stranded himself. The air-sea rescue had to be called so that the hounds could be winched to safety. It made the local TV news much to my sister’s embarrassment.
But as much as Flynn and the other dogs are constant reminders of what it is to be present, they have taught me more fundamental truths about what’s important in life.
Before I had a dog I rarely saw my sister from one month to the next, but so firm was the immediate bond between our dogs that we started to walk together every day.
Those walks opened space for conversations we would probably never have had and we would not have learned things about one another and our parents that we didn’t realise we wanted to know.
I discovered walks I’d probably never have found that became the places I’m familiar with above all others across every season.
Because of our dogs, I can find the best blackberries when all the bushes in the more popular places have been stripped.
I can find the sloes that are still sitting on their thorny bows after others have been pillaged.
I can take you to places where the view through a gap in the trees is one you can stare at in any month of the year and feel a sense of peace and tranquillity you hadn’t noticed was missing.
I can show you where the apple tree was that the dogs would stop at every morning waiting for me to pick a fruit from the tree and distribute bites among them like a priest at mass.
I can lead you to the spot in the little sparkling stream through the woods where they’d splash. Daisy, just a puppy, didn’t realise she’d ventured into a deep plunge pool from which she couldn’t climb out requiring me to get in, fully clothed and up to my waist, to haul her to safety while Flynn stood on the bank as if to say, ‘You shouldn’t go in that bit Daisy.’
However much we love our dogs we are not dogs and so the pleasure of seeing them play happily with one another is a joy of its own.
This week, in the lead-up to another anniversary of my birth, as I’ve been preparing food for a visit from my children, Flynn hasn’t been well.
He’s been lethargic, less interested in his walks and not bothered about eating.
My sister took him for a scan at the vet after the various medications he’d been prescribed appeared to be having no effect.
Flynn died on my birthday. He was 11.
If we’re lucky and our dogs are too, we can expect them to be with us for less than 20% of our lives but their impact on us, if we are open to it, is greater than that by an order of magnitude.
Like all of life, whether it be ours, someone else’s, or that of a treasured pet, it’s a miraculous gift and maybe our ability to bear that in mind is what enables us, above all else, to take the best from the past, leave the future until it arrives, stay mostly in the moment and see if we can make it to thirty seconds whilst attempting a Downward-Facing Dog.
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