By Tyler Lewke
I’ve had lots of dogs.
They teach me things, like how to play and laugh and be unconditional. Unconditional…that’s a big one. I try and teach them as well but it’s not an even exchange.
My current dog, Charlie, is a bulldog named after my best friend in grade school, unless I call her Baba Ganoush, the food like hummus that nobody can pronounce but I can’t stop eating.
Charlie and I figure things out together. We live in two places. It’s harder to establish a routine, for her and for me. The elevator is big and scary. The subway shakes and she looks around and clings to my legs. The bus drivers occasionally honk when they see us. On any given day 30 dogs may come greet us unexpectedly. That’s when we’re urban.
Then we go suburban. Charlie has her own little set up in the car, complete with seat belts and toys and a booster so she can see out. When we get to the burbs, things slow down. Our walks don’t entail anything noisy or scary and we almost never bump into any other dogs, and there are no elevators, but the staircase has a menacing quality to it that Charlie is still reconciling with.
It’s hard to say which she likes more because when we’re suburban she gets to come to work with me where she now has a grandma and a bunch of friends but the urban life has a sense of intrigue that’s hard to deny.
Charlie and I have been together nearly around the clock now for two years.
In the olden days, Tibetan Monks would get new dogs and they would tie a lead to their waist and to the dog and spend the first few months attached to each other. Charlie and I are mostly doing it this way also. The monks talk of this bond that gets created, a certainty and comfort between the dog and his owner, a way of communicating that is more authentic than words.
I keep learning things as we spend all this time together. I throw us into every single environment l can find so she becomes certain that all is well, no matter what. Wrigley Field after the World Series was a perfect example. We’re marching into her fears head on. She’s already proven to be mightily adjusted and ready for almost everything.
What I’ve learned the most is her necessity to pause. We walk down the road and a new sound or experience shows up and she stops. Mostly, I stop with her. We each pause and she looks and listens and adjusts to the sound, then we begin again. I tried to keep her moving at first, however I’ve fallen in love with this way of learning.
When we hear the same sound again, she doesn’t pause. It seems like it’s only the very first time. It’s not fear, she doesn’t seem the least bit fearful or nervous. She seems intently curious. “What’s that?” “wow!” “wait, what’s that!?”
New, pause, go. New pause go.
At first a city block took a while. I enjoyed not being able to be in a hurry. Now we go a lot farther and much faster. But we still pause regularly. Alley. Garbage truck. Bikes. Pit Bull. Friendly guy. Little kid. Fireworks. Police sirens. New, pause, go.
Other people notice her pausing also. I’ve decided to honor her pause, so we occasionally hold up foot traffic on a busy sidewalk. Or crossing the road. Or when we manage the super scary swirling doors at the grocery store.
At first I thought people would be mad. But there is just something so captivating about her curious pause. People around us seem to pause also, to look where we look, to experience it in this fresh, new kind of way.
All this takes time. I didn’t think I had the time but Charlie had me make it.
It’s embarrassing to leave a meeting to take her outside, but it’s really remarkable to take a 10 minute walk and clear my head. I thought it would suck to get dressed and go outside right before bed, but I’ve discovered things I didn’t know about. Did you know the moon can change shape within the span of a single hour? Or that early in the morning the leaves and silence and dark streets feel haunted when the wind blows but aren’t scary at all? Or that an entire commerce exists in the middle of the night?
People are always going. And when you pause, did you know that people stop and say hello? Turns out, not everyone is on their phones, they actually want to meet you and decent human exchanges still exist?
I wasn’t as smart as Charlie for a long time. I forced myself to keep going. I barged through situations and feelings and days and life without allowing myself to re-adjust, to calibrate and then go again. I notice now how much more certain and capable Charlie is when we pause. If I try to force her to just keep going and push through it just doesn’t work that well.
We struggle. But if I just allow the few second pause, if we take just a second to breathe, notice and calibrate, all is well and everything becomes possible.
If we take just a second to breathe, notice and calibrate, all is well and everything becomes possible. ~ Tyler Lewke Share on X
Tyler Lewke is brutally irreverent, often way too direct and it gets him in trouble. He’s an optimistic pessimist, a grateful dad and friend, a hardcore capitalist, and a deep-seeking mindful and compassionate guy who’s most inspired by helping people through the bullshit parts of religion and spirituality to define a life of joy and contemplative service to others.
Tyler was born months before the official end of the Vietnam War on the Campus of Washington State University to a hippy mom and a heady scientist dad with an IQ that rivals Einstein… a combo that has left him totally out of place in the mainstream.
Tyler lives in the sky in downtown Chicago, in a 100-year-old bungalow in suburban Illinois and from his backpack as he explores the world. He teaches meditation and mindful leadership, has written as a form of art and spiritual practice every day for as long as he can remember. He shares his personal stories of integrating a spiritual life into a daily mainstream existence through his daily blog where he posts his raw, firsthand joys and struggles of trying to practice these mindful principles in all his affairs. Tyler thinks we all have only one real job, to add more love to the world.
Photo: (author provided)
Editor: Dana Gornall
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