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.

The Meaning of Life III: Competition and Institutional Goals

In which competitive sport does the competitor wake up and complete everyday?  Outside of abstractions of what "training" is, the answer is, "no sport has a competition everyday".  In the same way, why would our entire economic system, which has significant influence over our politics and thus inter-national communications, be based on competition?

Our political system should be based entirely on cooperation.  In the same way that a teacher must acknowledge and address the level of a student and his or her learning preferences, so too must a international community evaluation its constituents in terms of the "hidden curriculum" which is to Love.  I know it may sound absurd to say that a Nation's curriculum is to Love, but it is True, regardless of its silly, non-political sounding humanity.  It is true because all Peoples seek to survive, and in order to survive one must be well-verse in Love, especially when those People seek to survive in a diverse global community such as ours today.

Now, this means that any Nations with seemingly everlasting historical conflict need to invest, politically and economically, in the resolution of that conflict.  Institutions should conscientiously, openly, and by design have this as their end.  And this is not the responsibility of just the nation with the conflict, but of all nations.

So, if one nation does not have the means to resolve its conflicts due to the fact that it feels it must, first are foremost, compete in the global market, then that nation should be pardoned from competition in the global market and all other nations should contribute to the operations of that nation, so long as that nation focuses, for whatever duration of time necessary, on the resolution of its crippling conflicts.

The Meaning of Life

The purpose of Life is to Love Well. Thus, in ourselves and our surrounding, will we witness Meaning bloom like a fruit come to sustain we who husband the Land of Love, sacrificing its pulp to perpetuate our good cause.

To Love Well means that we acknowledge the gift that is our capacity to love and explore its magnitude, with both a scientific and religious spirit. Scientific insofar as we test it, we dare to hypothesize (e.g. that it is infinite) and then endeavor to prove that it, in fact, is as we hypothesized or is not. Religious insofar as we resurrect love -- even when it seems dead and gone, even when it seems like it never was -- with the breath of our belief and the tenderness of our humanity.

When I say that the purpose of Life is to Love well, it is to accept this gift of Love, first; to know it, second; and through knowing it, allow ourselves to be changed by it so as to not kill the enemy, not trespass on other students of Love, but to destroy our very own mal-constructed knowledges of what Love is.

This day we may not see as easily with the imagination of the mind, but indeed, with the heart we are obliged to hold fast to this vision.

The purpose of Life is to Love well. In order to to this we must study Love and in order to do this we must endeavor to first and foremost love ourselves, for in ourselves, we will find every law of Nature and of Man, every theorem of mathematics, every philosophy of every philosopher, and so forth. In ourselves we will find the light and The Light, the flesh and the bone and the Spirit and the Soul and in there, somewhere, we will find what all men, since the dawn of consciousness, have intuited to be greater than which any single man can imagine: that wondrous capacity to Love, that capacity that knoweth no limits save for our own failure to act, our own unwillingness to believe (which is to say, act with the love of a mature heart, even when the mature mind counsels otherwise).

Be not shepherded by Temptation, but by Love, and only Love.  And if thy art shepherded by Temptation, it is to learn the difference between Temptation and Love.  Once the difference is distinguished, that phase of your growth is over and you should endeavor to release temptation and this is also done with Love, for Temptation has taught you.

Loving well is not easy and in our efforts we are sure to fail. In this cycle of believing, trying, failing, we are left with the final gesture of loving ourselves again, despite failure; which is to say, believing in Love and its eternity, despite any quantity of empirical results suggesting otherwise.

To Love holistically is to recruit all orders of thinking, including that Highest Order Thinking which we tend to believe is preserved for difficult problems of a mathematical, philosophical, economical, theoretical, academic, even moral sort sometimes … when, in simple fact, this high order thinking is nothing more than that faculty to Love and the intensity and rigor often required to do so, well.

"Endeavor to Love well", is the proposition here, friends.  And if you do so already, endeavor to do so to a degree you cannot presently imagine; the whole World of Man, and the whole Universe of Energy will conspire in your favor.  For in this Life, Love is the Alpha and the Omega.