When I am tired, and I don’t want to go outside, it is so easy to just lie around and spend wasteful time on social media. I sometimes look up, and realize an hour has gone by, and except for reading, nothing productive has been accomplished. Then I look at the brown eyes of my dog Porter. So…
I walk the dog.
There are days when I have 25-30 call backs for clients after having spent 8 hours of seeing clients. I can do some more quickly than others, and more often than not, I get an answering machine. I realize that very few listen to my messages, and just call back at their convenience, which is often not my convenience. If they had listened to my message there would be no need to call me back, disturb the receptionist, have them track me down and disturb me on another call or with a client, just to be told to have the caller listen to the message.
So I walk the dog.
Sometimes I am at work, and everything seems to go wrong. For one reason or another, we remember the things that don’t go right rather than the things that do go right. When a friend was commenting on how lucky I am, that it must be so nice just to “play” with dogs and cats all day, I look at them and ask “what is the worst that can go wrong on one of your work days?”. With the exception of my human counterparts, I remind these people, when my day goes wrong, an animal dies.
Then I walk my dog.
I listen to the news. I despair about the world around me. I question so many things that I thought were truths, which are now either being questioned, or being disproven. What was once black and white is now so many shades of grey. Then I look at my black friends deep brown eyes, I smile…
Which is why I walk my dog.
So of course, my resolution always revolves around walking the dog. In Hudson, we are so fortunate to have wonderful places to complete this resolution. However in my mind, walking the dog involves off leash walking. A well behaved dog is a pleasure to watch running and enjoying our landscape freely. We must be respectful of people who don’t like dogs, but in turn people need to be respectful that my dogs need some freedom, and not overreact when I take the time to call them back and leash them. I try to bag any feces, and I am watchful for those walking their dogs on leash- Most leashed dogs react poorly to an unleashed dog in their face. If you can’t do the above, then the privilege of off-leash walking is not for you. Please don’t ruin it for the majority.
As we move into the New Year, and I work with the town to implement more reasonable dog by-laws, I hope most of us will appreciate what we do have.
And of course, I always walk the dog.
