The Dog Dogma

On Thanksgiving weekend we added a puppy to our home.

I’ve wanted a dog since I was a child. We briefly had one in the home when I was in my late teens but I had to move and he didn’t live very long.

The situation was never “right”. At times in my life it was a real fight, but as with a lot of things I conceded. I wanted it, but i understood the reasons we shouldn’t. I wanted it but I couldn’t argue the point and somewhere along the way I stopped hoping, asking or looking.

Of course, today my life isn’t the same as it was formerly. Still, the main points against getting a dog have always been that I don’t own a home and I am not independently wealthy. These are facts about my life that haven’t changed, but they’re also unlikely to ever change.

So my question then becomes, “if not now, when?”

This is my Dog Dogma.

Many things, as it turns out, come down to this kind of thinking. I have been drowning in regret for a couple of years and a lot of it is over losing time.

I feel like I lost a lot of time before I knew better.

I have to ask myself these days, “what’s stopping me?”

Sometimes there are really good reasons to put something on hold. Sometimes things just don’t make sense for where we are at. Sometimes, though, we let the idea of what someday might look like stop is from doing things now.

I have heard that healing begins when we let go of the idea that the past could have been anything other than it was. I like this idea, though admittedly I’m not there yet.

There are a lot of things I look back on now that seem so clear. I struggle to meet my former self with love or understanding on both ends. Part of me thinks I could have used what I know now  and have manipulated the situation. If I’d have known more I might have found my way to success, understanding and togetherness.

The other part is pissed that I put in so long just to wind up broken anyway. Everything I was afraid of and trying to avoid came true and that’s a tough pill to swallow.

I ask myself what the pros and cons are, how important it is to me and whether the cons are likely to change. Can I live with the consequences? Do I want to live without?

The Buddha says that happiness is a present moment manifestation. There’s nothing for us in the past nor will we find out peace by creating goal posts in our future. Instead, we observe the conditions that exist in the moment we are presently in.

I can do this most of the time these days. Sometimes I get tied up in my head. Sometimes I forget what I’m doing. Sometimes I spend most of my day looking behind me and spinning irrelevant answers to outdated questions no one hears but me. Then I remember that healing isn’t a magic potion but a conscious effort to make a new pathway. I remember that I have tools I can use and that snapping out of it is an action I need to take.

Six months ago, looking at the present moment for my joy was tougher.

Nostalgia is my drug of choice these days. Like cocaine, I have this idea that running through the old times in my brain will somehow make me feel better, though the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

It’s funny though, up until now I had this very specific timeframe in my mind where things were “good”. This timeframe is one where I was cooking wholesome food from scratch, running a blog and making a name for myself in writing, and raising my first child in a hands on way. I was thin. I had a home. I held this in my mind as the ultimate version I would never come close to being.

But I never examined how I felt inside.

I held this as the goalpost because I managed to look like I could do it. I wasn’t healthy, I was obsessing and disordered. Our home wasn’t happy. I was considering life on my own, even then. I didn’t have it all together at all, I just spent all my energy trying to seem like it and always feeling like I was falling short.

There’s not a single era I look back on today and wish to revisit. Nothing in my past is romanticized, no version back there is better. Today I’m firmly planted in the life I envisioned for myself and my children. We spend our time together, we are there for each other and our home feels safe and comfortable most of the time. When I wake up in the morning and make coffee with my dog, not an ounce of me questions if we’re on the right path.

It hurts to close the page on twenty years. That’s the truth of the matter, no matter how clearly it needed to happen. I am still sad and mad and fearful of being alone, even if my world today is beautiful and simple and bursting with excitement over the smallest of things.

I may always hold a sliver of this inside me- feeling that I failed as much as was failed. I guess that’s what makes us who we are, if we’ll let it. I know that this wound is a gift. To be so profoundly dismantled means an opportunity to rebuild.

It’s about weighing it out. Deciding what we can or want to live with.

I don’t want to hold off on anything just because the conditions aren’t perfect. Perfect is as much a concept as tomorrow is.

No more thinking I have infinite days of maybe.