Is Lucy free or is Lucy a captive? It’s the prisoner’s paradox. As for her provisions, there is a regular ration given to her by me, a portion for each day, all the days of her life. That’s the biblical life of a freed captive, freed but not restored to power. Even so, Lucy does not have to strive for survival; she just has to eat what is put in front of her. Survival is a a great purpose in life, so is the dog devoid of purpose? Of course not! The purpose her captors have given her is to keep us smiling. Oh wait, that’s our purpose and might not be Lucy’s purpose, however, but rather her utility to us. If I had to guess, I’d say this dog’s purpose is excitement. She seeks out excitement. She does not want to be left out of any opportunity for potential play or fun. She seeks excitement. The rest of the time, her main issue seems to be getting comfortable while waiting for something exciting to happen.
Getting comfortable is not as easy as it sounds. If I lie around too long on my pillows, I get stiff and uncomfortable. I can rearrange all I want, but comfort does not arrive. Only the oblivion of sleep or the oblivion of being fully occupied in some physical pursuit (think intense activities here like walking to the kitchen to make coffee) can erase the discomfort. But Lucy lies around all day, so I wonder how she can possibly be comfortable. The vet told me once that dogs don’t experience pain and discomfort the same way that people do. They accept pain as part of life, she said. I think her point at the time was sort of a rebuke to me for not giving Lucy enough credit for being in pain from her knee injury. So I gave Lucy pain killers for a while. I accepted the premise that Lucy was experiencing great pain, but since she wasn’t expressing it, I didn’t know, but I should have known. I think that was the vet’s point: that a dog can experience great pain but ignores it to carry on with life. The epistemological question of how the vet would know whether and how a dog was experiencing pain continues to baffle me, as does the question of ignoring pain. If I’m actually ignoring pain, I’m not feeling the pain, am I? I realize that these remarks apply more to discomfort than to extreme pain, which in my own (luckily reasonably limited) experience eclipses all other thought.
I have never been able to stand comfortably. Yet I can stand in the kitchen cooking for hours. I’ve wondered if my mind is just so occupied with the cooking process that I don’t pay attention to my body? How does that accommodation work? Recently I started practicing yoga again after a many-year hiatus. The pose I absolutely cannot do these days is the corpse. If I relax one muscle, another tenses up. If I relax the other, the first tenses up. I have memories of being able to relax completely, but these memories are intellectual and I can’t recreate them physically. I’m trying to be patient, to compromise, to just be absolutely still, and to just stop worrying about relaxing various muscles here and there. If they need to be tensed, well, that’s an interesting fact. The modern mindfulness orthodoxies are quite emphatic about accepting what is, just observing without judgments or attempts to change. Like dogs?
I'm presuming, from her pose, that you've just read your piece out to Lucy!
Great literary piece you have provided this time - very thought provoking/