Being like dogs

Why can’t I be more like my dogs? They are present with every moment. They rest. They seek quietness. They are fully playful. Their joy is contagious, palpable, full-hearted.

The presence is what I’m talking about. The presence is what I envy. To be one with every morsel of cheese the universe throws my way. To meet resistance and punishment with love. To let the day wash over you.

Dogs aren’t trying to get anywhere. They don’t have a master plan to fulfill. They don’t feel bad about napping at noon. They don’t have an agenda to fulfill. They don’t have to work 60 hour weeks to fight off feelings of insecurity. They don’t have to do anything. They simply are who they are. They are loved, they spread love. They go on walks, sometimes they are left home. They flow with the tides. They don’t have control, and yet they are at peace. They don’t know when the next walk is coming (I mean they do, don’t they — creatures of habit).

Why do we fight so hard to get away from the present? What is so painful or unbearable about the present that we ardently flee. We drink black velvet, we watch terrible television, we talk to people we don’t even respect about whether the eldest Kardashian will ever ‘go blonde.’ This stuff isn’t fulfilling. And yet, we 9 times out of 10, choose that over taking a fucking breath.

Why?

Is it the silence? The sound of paradox. Is it resistance to boredom? Or is it simply habit? Are the neural pathways carved thus so?

How do we cultivate mental malleability? How can we reconnect the wires to BE HERE.

In a podcast I listened to today, Jack Kornfield was talking about (and I’m paraphrasing) opening up our tolerance to sit with the inexorable spectrum of states that accompany being a person on this odd, wet planet.

The word tolerance stuck with me. Merriam’s top hit: “The capacity to endure pain or hardship”. Notice he used the work ‘opening’ and not building. Meaning that the capacity already exists to be one with these truths, with these pains and joys and sorrows. There isn’t a spiritual muscle milk we need to drink to gain this tolerance, it is within us. It is the marrow, the carbon, the ATP, the glial cells. It is the real meat and the mysterious soulful matter.

If we see this as an innate endowment of the human condition, then it really doesn’t sound like tolerance, it sounds like actualization.

We need to actualize our perpetual oneness with the present. It is always here, it never goes away. It is the stuff. Everything else is what we build up tolerance to endure. The easy part is letting go — to flow with the natural state.

Think about how much pain just shopping for jeans entails. There’s body stuff, hopeful visions of what could be, sexual projection, the examination of the ass and the thighs — whether they touch in the right ways or don’t touch at all. There’s the money stuff, the pollution from toxic dyes, the considerations of how much longer bootcut will be in vogue.

These are real considerations. All of which may flow through my head on a theoretical mental shopping trip while I sit on the toilet before my morning coffee. My personal denim diatribe, one of many discourses on dumb shit that I weigh infinite pro’s and con’s on, flashing on a superhighway of conscious thought. Bullet trains of various problems or memories or daydreams or desires to ponder.

I think there’s a clinical word for it, anxiety? Maybe for you it’s depression. We all wear the wet blanket of societal habit in different ways. We have been culturally programmed with this train schedule. Built up from centuries of wiring — responding to dangers, or industrialization, or biological banalities.

We need to peel back the layers. Or at least give them some air. Take a sample, like an archaeologist. Archiving the data is the first step. Once we can take a step back and, from a more detached view, observe the millenia of circumstances that brought you to this very moment in time — it’s starts to get a little bit easier to notice the evaporating tea on the lip of your mug.