The joy of Grace

This is a short one...just a couple of videos of my dog Grace. She gets such joy from such simple activities. These made us giggle. Hope you enjoy them, too. This is classic Grace.

Lesson #5 from my dog

I realized this morning that it has taken me awhile to pick up on the lesson our dog taught us as soon as we adopted her from the family that raised her from a puppy for 3 years.  You'd think that it would have been traumatic for her to suddenly move from a loving home to a new home at that age, but she took it all in stride and surprised all of us.  I think what it boils down to is that, no matter how much the other family loved her, it wasn't enough to keep her as part of their family.  I always assumed it was just because Grace's loyalty is to anyone that feeds her. While this may be true in part, I still give her credit for embracing us as her new family so quickly and completely. 

For me, this translates to learning to completely embrace that community of people that care about me and understand me.  At the same time, I am learning to let go of the people that were in my life that do not care enough about me to keep me around in their lives.  It's a lesson in moving on.  That doesn't mean forgetting or letting go of the friends I have in other places. It just means that when I find myself among people that don't seem to understand me anymore, that we part ways. 

As my dog has shown me, it does not have to lead to sadness.  She is a very happy dog that embraces what she does have at all times.  We are always a work in progress, and that means that we should expect that sometimes, we will move beyond the people that we used to call friends.

I could learn a lot from my dog

Most of the time when I think about my dog, Grace, a large lab/Great Pyrenees mix, I would not think she could teach me much. For one thing, she's kind of a dope, cute but not very bright.  However, I can now see many personality traits in her that I would do well to adopt.  These are a few of the things I have learned:

1) Be adventurous in eating.  Based on the disgusting eating habits of my dog, you would not expect I would want to take any cues from her. The part that I can draw from is her willingness to try new things, almost anything, in fact, and then decide if it's good or not.  In my own life, I could stand to be a little more open to new foods than I sometimes am.  This, I have already started to change.

2) Live in the moment.  Grace doesn't worry about what happened 10 minutes ago, and she never fears the future.  She fully embraces the right now.  Sometimes, this means she gets an impulse to dig a hole, so she does it, and is remorseful about it later.  I think I could definitely use a lot more spontaneity in my life and a lot less regret and worry.

3) Meet new people with an open mind.  To Grace, every person and dog is a potential friend. She never hesitates to walk right up to any person or animal and greet them with curiosity and friendliness. I am sometimes jealous of her total lack of social awkwardness, but the more I watch her, the more it inspires me to follow her lead.

4) Embrace playtime.  Grace often finds a toy and starts racing around the house with it all by herself. She plays with joyful abandon and loves it when others join in. She even tries to get the cats to play, and it almost works sometimes. The most important part is that she is having fun, and who couldn't use a little more fun in their life?