Do Sweat the Small Stuff

I think we've already established that I sweat all the stuff.  But really, the little stuff matters.  Here's one way that I know.

Finnegan is my dog.  He's a two year old yellow Lab, and he's wonderful.   He's loving and smart and devoted to me.  He's also strong and a little ill-mannered sometimes.  I wanted a high-energy dog to do things with - a companion to get me outside and moving and doing things that I say I love but don't otherwise get to: hiking, camping, kayaking....  I envisioned a life of gentle adventure with my sweet, beautifully-trained dog by my side.

And we were on our way when weirdness struck, as it occasionally does.  In late October, I traveled more than I usually do, which meant that he was boarded for a long-ish stretch.  He loves his boarding place; I'm absolutely confident about that.  He was happy to see me when we re-united.

But when it was time on the next Monday to go to daycare, he didn't want to go. I thought nothing of it. Maybe he was tired.  Maybe he was just enjoying being in his own house.  No worries.  He can stay home.  Days stretched into weeks.  Weeks stretched into months.  I tried to get him into the car for daycare, but ended up with 80 pounds of highly motivated Lab fighting against me.  On work mornings, I don't have time for a lot of that.  It's get in the car now, or stay home.  He stayed home.

In fact, he wouldn't get in the car for any reason.  We couldn't go to the park, kayak, hike... any of the things I imagined doing with my dog.  We were constrained to walks on a leash around the neighborhood.  I was certainly bored, and I imagine he was too.  At its worst, we were walking the long way around the house to get to the door so that he didn't have to walk down the driveway near the car.

We worked and worked on this, for 5 long months.  And of course in that time, I had no idea if the training and the baby steps would work at all.  I found myself contemplating Shakespeare and "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds."  I was deeply disappointed that we did not have the life I had imagined, but I also was still besotted with him and needed to find a way to lead a happy life together.

As you can see from the picture, he gets in the car now - weirdly, as though there had never been a problem.  Who even knows what was going on in that little mind of his.

But back to sweating the little stuff.  Other people's dogs stay home and lead contented dog lives.  MY life, though, goes remarkably better when Finn goes to daycare twice a week.  When that didn't happen, the house got messier.  In part, this is because he was home messing it up, but also more of my time had to be devoted to keeping him occupied and stimulated.  We weren't going to training classes, so he got a little less well-mannered.  It isn't possible to exhaust a young Labrador Retriever with three walks a day.  It's just not.  So he was bored and acting out.  I routinely came home to the kitchen trash strewn across the kitchen floor, and had to return to crating him while I was away.  And we weren't doing the things that are good for me, either - like cross-country skiing and hiking and watching the eagles.  So my fitness suffered.  And most fundamentally, our relationship suffered.  He learned that he could get what he wanted if he just argued with me about it long enough.  He had me trained, and that's for sure.

And all of that happened because one little thing came unhinged.  Maybe life is just a series of little things, and managing those little things makes the big things manageable.  And they're just little things -not hard to do in the moment, at all.  I need to remember that and gently tend the infrastructure of my life.  It matters.