Everyday my dog makes me smile. Sometimes I daydream about working with dogs. Use their intelligence to help me do things on a farm, occasionally I’ll obsessively watch horse loggers do their job on YouTube, got real jealous the other day when I saw a video of Jane Goodall working with a monkey, I get suggested tons of animal content on Instagram. Dunno if this is true, I’ve never read him, but apparently, “Nietzsche said the way to figure out what you really want is to be honest and listen to your envy” and I envy a lot of things so I guess I want a lot. It would be cool to work more directly with animals but I have zero science background, no horse or logging experience, no legitimate dog training experience, etc.

I get a similar enjoyment from the relationships with my pets. Reading about dogs is boring1 to me so this post is more about a discovery I had through my dog, which I reckon is what most dog writing is ultimately about, so if you find this boring then I won’t be offended if you close this web page.

Me and Okie go on daily walks. I ask him, “Do you wanna go on a walk?” and this rouses him. We used to walk for about 30 minutes (his typical mile pace), but over time the walks became longer. This is because Okie doesn’t want to go home. We’ll get to one of the corners that turn us back home and he’ll pull the other way. We’re always in negotiation. Sometimes we’ll make him go on a shorter walk but more often we follow his route.

Okie lives to wander around the town and smell, hoping to play with another dog on the sidewalk or greet a stranger. He stops to smell everything, more than any dog I’ve ever known. Swear to God my dog smells more than your dog. He just stood there with the wind blowing hard in his face and smelled it and tried to pull us in that direction. I used to be frustrated by this because I wanted to hurry back home, but now I try to let him set the pace and take us where he wants to go. I believe that the walk is the highlight of his day and this has influenced me to let the walks go longer. It’s wrong to deprive him of that part of his life, therefore we go on longer walks so that he has the opportunity to live a good life2.

The walk has become the highlight of my day, too. Now this is what I look forward to each day. An hour long walk where I go outside and all the cliched poetic experiences of being out in the world with no screen and misidentifying trees and thinking up bad sentences and watching the crows shit all over the sidewalk and smelling the wastewater treatment plant as we walk by and the cold winds a’blowin and chapping my face etc.

It makes me wonder: what would life look like if the daily walk was the primary objective of each day? It’s already a cornerstone, but what if my day existed solely to go on a long walk? That seems like a nice way to live.

Makes me think of the writer and activist Mark Baumer. He is very inspiring. I would miss my dog and cat and Zoe if I did something like that, though.

Now I’m thinking about how Mark Baumer inspires me and he doesn’t elicit the feeling of envy: maybe Nietzsche was wrong about that, though there is some sense in looking at your envy to learn things about yourself.

  1. Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog is the only dog book that has moved me. My brother Lee recommended it. Taught me a lot about dogs and made me even more appreciative for my relationship with Okie. I am very envious of that writer’s life, back when a writer could afford to live near Jackson Hole by writing magazine articles about nature, dogs, hunting, and fishing. ↩

  2. Must watch this “Mountain Dogs” video about these dogs who hike by themselves everyday. ↩