Today for Musings
I’m sharing today’s blog from Following Atticus because I found it very
inspiring. Will is on the left and
Atticus on the right. The book Following Atticus is a great book. You can follow Tom Ryan and his two friends
on Facebook where I found this link to Tom’s blog.
http://www.tomandatticus.blogspot.com/
There are times when we glimpse
the extraordinary in the ordinary. Sometimes sitting in the backyard is more
profound than standing on a mountaintop.
I
know Atticus well.
It’s a product of twelve years together, starting when he was eight weeks old. But
more importantly, it has to do with our partnership in hiking far more than a
thousand mountains together, sometimes in extreme conditions. In the mountains,
up high and far away from home and everyone you’ve ever known, when the
temperature soars to unbearable reaches or the cold comes at you at forty below
zero wind chill, or the snow is blinding and you are stuck in unexpected
blizzard conditions halfway through a twenty-four mile a hike, you reach new
levels of knowing and trusting.
Trust is everything. We had that from the beginning, but it was strengthened in
the mountains.
Hiking is an intimate partnership. Strangers become fast friends. True friends
become even truer. And when man and woman meet on the trails, well, let’s just
say these mountains host as many affairs as the hotels in Boston do on any
given day. So while I don’t pretend to know everything Atticus is thinking, I
feel comfortable in knowing what he wants most of the time, what makes him
happy, what fulfills him, what he dislikes. And it’s not just the silent human
and dog bond, it’s the connection between two hiking partners who have grown in
the mountains together.
With Will, I’m still getting to know him. I do my best to put myself in his
position and try to figure him out that way. I do not know much about his past.
What I do know is how scarred and scared he was when he came to us. How angry
and lacking trust he was. I saw the rot in his mouth from lack of care, the
hips that had been imprisoned in a crate for far too long, the willingness to
bite and draw blood. Somewhere along the way Will had been betrayed. He’d grown
old and was not taken care of.
I’m told there’s a difference between neglect and abuse, but I don’t see one.
Neglect is just another form of abuse, whether it is from ignorance and
arrogance. Our job is to care for others in our lives, and if we can’t do that,
the least we can do is not hurt them. I catalogued these observations in my
head over the first few months Will came to live with us. It was my job to put
myself in his place, to figure out how to help him, if I could, and figure out
if he wanted to be helped. The rest was up to him. With Atticus it’s easy.
We’ve always been together and more often than not, I just know. With Will, I
don’t presume to know much. Still, we did the usual things – the supplements
and drugs for hips and pain, dental work, a wholesome diet, healthy grooming
habits, protecting him from himself and the outside world. But that was only
the beginning.
We all have a story to tell and after those initial steps, Will started to
reveal his own. I don’t pay much attention to the past or to why things
happened as they did in his life. I rarely think about the people he used to
live with, nor do I completely condemn them for I don’t know their whole story.
What I have been concerned with from the beginning is how Will is any given
day.
I decided to leave behind his past, and concentrate on his present and the
future. As a man who grew up with abuse, I understand that the best way to live
is to concentrate on the next step….on the now and the places you’re going.
Yes, we can learn from the past, but we can also be made prisoner by it. So we
took what we could from Will’s past and then dumped it. It no longer mattered.
One of the reasons I like this photo from yesterday is because it speaks of
possibilities.
It looks simple enough. Will is doing something a lot of animals like to do.
He’s sitting outside on a picturesque summer day, enjoying the shade and the
breeze and the way he feels. But when we first met Will, he didn’t sit. He
couldn’t sit. He gets massages. I stretch him out. He gets many warm baths and
cold river soaks. He may be deaf and mostly blind but I concentrate on his
senses with textures, scents, tastes, and vibrations. Do these help? I like to
think it all contributes to his quality of life but I refuse to be absolute in
understanding everything.
But what I do know is that he now he sits. Not often and not for long, but it’s
so damn good to look at him doing something we all take for granted that was
once robbed from him. Will cannot run
and bound through the yard or the forest, or even leap up onto the couch. He
has physical limitations. But the again when I’m around a hundred, if I live to
be that old, I’ll have them as well. Heck, at only fifty-three I have many.
I can do many things that Will cannot. I take some of them for granted. But
here’s something Will and I do have in common. It’s possibility. The gift of
now. No matter what happened yesterday, or two years ago, or when we were
young, what we have today is what matters most. We always have a choice to
elevate the day, as Thoreau once mentioned. I don’t know all the answers to the
puzzle of Will. But day by day, through friendship and empathy, we seem to find
our way. I teach him, he teaches me, together we learn and grow. He and Atticus
are as different as their ears are, but what’s powerful about each of their
stories is that it is unique. Not one is more special than the other. So on this morning, as I sit next to Atticus
who is watching me, and Will snores a few feet away, something he’ll do many
times throughout the day, I ask one simple question for the three of us knowing
that each of us is different yet connected.
What can we unwrap today? Gifts are everywhere,
even if they are wrapped in mystery and challenge, in scars and fear. When I
look at Will, I smile because of his quality of life. There are many things he
cannot do. But there are so many that he can. He can now trust. He can be
happy. He can love. And he can accept love.
So while I do not know everything about Will, what I do know is what I
see. It’s called life. And Will’s is a good one because he's made it so.
Have a blessed day!
Paige
