It Happens to the Best of Us July 19, 2014

It doesn’t happen often, but I’m man (er, I mean dog) enough to admit it when it does. Sometimes I’m wrong. There, I said it. And while I’m not entirely sure whether I’m wrong about this, I realized today that I could be.

I’ve never much cared for the phrase “what if.” What if I had more money? What if I could change the world? What if I had never found my forever people? To me, these two words pay homage to something for which I’ve never much cared. There is a negative, almost cynical tone to these questions that I can’t say I appreciate. It seems contradictory to my desire to live in the now and cherish the presence of presence.

But the more I watch dear baby Carter and his efforts to explore and understand the world around him, I realize I could be wrong. Today I observed as some of my favorite little people played and laughed and smiled together. Dear Sophie and Abigail and Sam all wrestling around with little Carter as he starts to figure out how to crawl. It was just as I had always hoped it would be.

In those moments, just after he froggie hopped his way across the room from Abby to Sophie and back again, I was reminded of everything he has in front of him. His life is literally full of “what ifs” right now. And there is nothing wrong with that. Not only that, but there’s something exciting, invigorating even, about it.

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible,” suggested Italian Catholic preacher Saint Francis of Assisi.

So I guess I might have been wrong about my perspective on this phrase all these years. Because ultimately that’s what it comes down to yet again. Perspective. From the ground up, it has a way of changing the glass from being half empty to being half full. It has a way of making us see what’s possible within the impossible.

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Sharing Is Caring January 4, 2014

It’s nothing new for me necessarily. Except it is. This love I have for the new little person is unlike any other kind of love I’ve felt before. And yet again, he has rendered me speechless as I have no idea how to put this feeling into words.

So instead I have been putting them to action. I realized yesterday it wasn’t bothering me that Carter has replaced me as the attention source for visitors. That he too was sharing joy from the inside out.

But that hardly puts my own mission to rest. Today I was successful sharing joy my way. From the ground up, smiles and laughter filled the room during a rousing game of pickle in the middle with two of my favorite little people Abby and Isabelle. And the best part came afterward when we cuddled.

That’s when I was reminded that joy is not replacable. It’s not a limited time offer. And it is best shared. There is joy in sharing it is an embodiment of this thing called love.

 

Those Three Words May 11, 2013

I never really know what to expect when I spend time with the little people in my life. One minute I’m the pickle in the middle in a game involving one of my favorite stuffed hedgehogs. The next minute I’m being propped up across from an iPad being faux-interviewed about my life. Everything is an adventure in their minds. Everything seems new and exciting. I find inspiration in the surprises at every corner, and today was no exception.

“I love you Wiley,” Abigail said, as she gave me a random and surprisingly lung-crushing hug amidst our game of pickle in the middle this afternoon. Like many of the best of love’s most precious moments, it caught me off guard. Like the North Face jackets and Coach purses of the world, the “l-word” has lost some of its impact due to overuse. 

But that doesn’t keep my little doggie mind from going crazy when I think about some of the things I love. Peanut butter. My forever people. The driver’s seat in any car. Popsicles. Long walks on sunny afternoons. My friends in the blogosphere. Aaron Rodgers. The little people in my life. My forever home. This is only a mere sample of my laundry list of people, places and things that come to mind when my heart starts to race as a side effects of thinking about the l-word.

While I am sure that no two people share the exact same list, I can also venture to say that diversity is the common thread any two lists would share. So how is it we feel these different kinds of feelings and file them all under the l-word in our personal dictionary of life?

I think it’s to do with some other l-words we all know all too well. Longing. Loss. Lies. These are some of the realities of the world in which we live. These words (and the emotional havoc they bring) are some things everyone has in common. No one’s life is perfect. If it wasn’t this it would be something else.

But in love there is victory. Relief. Truth. Life experience brings love full circle by allowing us to appreciate the good things, no matter how silly. Perhaps it is because the loss and lies that made up much of my puppyhood made me long to feel life-changing love. One of my biggest fears was that I would never find it. The l-word. Or worse, I wouldn’t feel it again after the hurt I’d experienced.

But as American industrialist Henry Ford once said, “one of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.”

I am so blessed, not only to have found so many things to love in life, but to find it coming from so many different people, places, and things. I never really know what to expect when I spend time with the little people in my life. But I find inspiration in their creativity and sense of adventure. And I live for surprises like my moment with Abigail today. They might be said too much, but those three words have yet to lose their meaning to me.