by Al Drinkle
My wife and I said farewell to our elderly dog, Nika, last week. She was at least 16 years old, and I had the pleasure of spending the last 12 years with her. Her passing inspired me to dig up the following, which I wrote earlier this year and now wish to share with you:
Nika rests while I write this. As she gruntingly exhales and stirs into deeper realms of comfort, I marvel at the simplicity of her methods to improve lives, and the dissonance between the innate, instinctive wellspring of joy that she inspires versus the debilitating “wisdom” that our society has proliferated for centuries.
Whither has our insight and intelligence gotten us? Technology, philosophy and religion have all failed us. We're sentenced to this disorienting world, spending our time either anticipating elation greater than whatever satisfaction we're lucky enough to experience, or lamenting our station and incoherently striving for meaning. It's a perpetual vortex of suffering and any alleviation we can distract ourselves with tends to be hopelessly fleeting. Who could have imagined that the answer could be so simple?
It's not that Nika is entirely altruistic; she invites belly scratches, immodestly courts tasty morsels and displays vehement self-indulgence while on her walks. But shining through this is an unconditional love that epitomizes the words strewn about by centuries of poets – words so clichéd they seem saturated with vapidity, and yet through Nika this love shimmers with candor. A lack of understanding shields her from the concerns of political upheaval, romantic turbulence and the unrelenting brutality of life which affects us all, even if its distribution is unequal. But even given her limited intellectual capabilities, she wastes no time and risks not her potential to flourish by harboring disdain, prolonged disappointment, resentment or arrogance. Perhaps her sense of self doesn't even extend beyond physical comfort (or a slight modification thereof).
Nika wants those around her to be happy. Her only strategy to precipitate this when she (with astounding sensitivity) detects that somebody could use cheering up is to present herself as a furry, silent agent of acute sympathy which almost immediately morphs into infectious joviality. It's as if to say, “you've already literally adopted me, now adopt my disposition as your model of contentedness whereby a small dish of food, the daily touch of a loved one and regular intervals out of doors engender an innervating happiness that's sagaciously impervious to the trivialities that you've been taught to mistake for maledictions. Let us be allies in the celebration of unbridled felicity.”
Old age has slowed Nika down, but she remains an inspiration. Our polluted brains require chemical adjustments, multi-faceted therapy, subscription to religious fatuity and any number of other complex resets to ward off debilitating, if not terminal, unhappiness. But like an enlightened monk, Nika foregoes self in favor of comprehensive satisfaction and its seemingly effortless dissemination. I must never forget how lucky I am to have such an agent of happiness in my life and will attempt to carry her teachings with me long after she's gone.
