What I've Learned from Dogs

I was a cross country runner at Cornell University from 2001 to 2003. The city of Ithaca New York, where you will find Cornell, is beautiful because of its rather balanced relationship with the natural environment. In Ithaca, you will find waterfalls, gorges, hills, woods, and Cayuga lake, among other wonders of nature. And as a runner I had the special opportunity to know these places in the intimate way that only running, hiking, or biking can offer.

Our team would leave from Bartel's Hall and follow one of many paths that covered anywhere between 5 and 30 kilometers. There was one path that was mostly pavement – relatively quiet streets shaded by trees lining the road, along which there were modest, middle and upper middle class homes with yards and dogs and so forth. On this running loop (I forget the name of it now), there was this one house in particular that had two dogs and they would always, without fail, dart out of where ever they were and race toward the street where were were running. And they would be barking madly.

A dog's bark betrays the emotions and/or intentions of the dog. Whereas the dog may simply want to show that it is excited or happy, the bark, at least to the human ears, sounds the same as the bark of an angry attack or a threat.

I remember the first runs, responding with fear, thinking that the dogs would come chase after me and bite me, which is not unheard of. It took me a few times to not be afraid or to respond with my own “bark” to show that they weren't going to psychologically dominate me, and they would either retreat or stop barking and run more calmly behind me until they determined they were far enough away from their home or running with me simply wasn't as fun without the barking.

My self-awareness evolved considerably, I'd say, because of these dogs. After conquering my reaction and indeed rendering it a conscious response to their barking, I still had a sensation of annoyance. “Why do these dogs always come barking every time we run by?” I thought to myself each time. And this irritated me. I thought that the dogs were irritating me and felt that irritation evolve on its own, conquering my opinions of dogs in general, even, creating limits within my heart and mind, reinforcing the feeling of irritation with the labor of constructing arguments to the end of validating my reaction.

The truth is, the dog is a dog. Dogs bark. That is a part of what they do. I don't underestimate the dog's sensitivities and capacities. Indeed, I am sure that the dog has an awareness equal to mine, even though I could not tell you how it is equal and in what ways a dog, specifically, is aware and spiritual and so forth. But I believe it.

I am a human being. At least in terms of rational thinking, the dog and I are not equals. From the human stand point, it is less the dogs responsibility to stop barking and “behave” then it is my responsibility to not permit the dog to have the power of irritating me. In the end, it is my emotional response. Correction: it was my emotional reaction that the dog elicited.

Much later, years later, it occurred to me that the special feature of my being is that I can train myself to respond in a manner that protects my peace, my happiness, or whatever it is I wish to preserve. This is the difference between reacting and responding. The dog was reacting to our passing by. The dog had no reason to change his reaction, no reason to fashion a response. I did. My reaction was my problem and, as a human being, I had to do the intellectual labor of reshaping that reactive energy so that it did not perturb me.  If my emotions bother me, it is my responsibility to examine why and see what I can I can do to alter my response before I blame whom or whatever elicited said reaction.

"This, I think, is the definition of 'response-ability'", barked the dog day after day to me -- I just didn't understand, at the time.