Here’s my weekly tip on how to improve your quality of life: If you are a dog owner, get out there and walk man’s best friend. And if you don’t own a dog, what in the holy hell is wrong with you? (joking)
For years I wrote a series called “Travels With Maggie,” detailing my daily walks with our beloved, five-year old Northwest Farm Terrier. As the series progressed, we added Maggie’s sibling, Toby, to the series. I talked about how each travel adventure began where the sidewalk ended and the wonders of life began, and as sappy as that sounds, like some ten-second sound bite from a Hallmark commercial, I really mean it.
These dogs allow me to experience the wonder of it all through their eyes, and I love every single day I spend with them.
What do I mean by improving my quality of life?
It’s not about improving my health. Truth be told, we don’t walk at a brisk pace at all, so I don’t think I’m getting any serious cardiovascular benefits from our jaunts. We stroll rather than walk, and the strolls are inevitably delayed, every ten feet or so, as Maggie and Toby stop to smell whatever it is they smell, a plant here, a clump of grass there, a stop sign, a fence post, a car tire . . . you get the picture, I’m sure.
And, when they are not sniffing, they are intently looking for squirrels, rabbits, birds, humans, other dogs, cats, anything with two or four legs which moves, anything which doesn’t move. Walks are not about walking for my two intrepid adventurers; walks are about discovery and experiencing, absorbing everything in their environment, categorizing it all, soaking it all up with sheer delight.
And it is in that soaking, the categorizing, that discovery and experiencing, that I learn from them, for all too often, in my lifetime, I have ignored the stunning beauty which is around me daily. I have been too busy. I have had too many important matters to attend to. I have been distracted, redacted, compacted, so preoccupied that I missed it all on most days.
The quality of life!
Taking it for granted all too often
The thing is, I live in a breathtakingly-beautiful part of the country. I have to remind myself that a great percentage of the people living in the U.S. have never experienced what I experience daily. The city where I live, Olympia, sits in a large basin between two mountain ranges. Thirty miles to the west are the Olympic Mountains; thirty miles to the east (approximations all) sit the Cascade Mountains. Olympia sits at the southern terminus of Puget Sound, an inland waterway with, literally, hundreds of islands. Technically, Puget Sound is an estuary, the second-largest estuary in the United States, second only to Chesapeake Bay.
Oh, the mountains! I lived in Vermont for two years, and the people there were quite proud of Mt. Mansfield, the tallest “mountain” in that state at 4,395 feet, and I would laugh, reminded of that scene from Crocodile Dundee . . . “that’s not a knife; this is a knife,” and Dundee pulls out this gargantuan hunting knife. That’s what it’s like living here. Mt. Rainier is a real mountain; Mt. Mansfield can only hope for the day when it grows up another ten-thousand feet.
The wonder of it all, big and small
But setting aside all of that, the mountains and Puget Sound and islands, tall evergreens, more lakes and rivers than one man can count, the dogs remind me that wonders come in all sizes, and they are on display daily if I am willing to look for them. All too often, in my life, I have concentrated on what was going wrong with the world and how it affected me negatively.
Those days are gone, and I have Bev to thank for that, and the dogs to thank for it, and the many friends I have made online to thank for it. We now have a travel trailer, and that trailer will allow us to see more wonders, far-off wonders, and I will share as many of them as possible, with you, as we begin our RV life.
Oh, the wonder of it all!
Life is good!
Life is friggin’ awesome!
And it’s all on display, every single day, where the pavement ends and the wonders begin.
Catch you down the Road of Life. Thanks for the visit.
