Paying Attention

How much attention are you really paying to your life?

If you read last Friday's post about the woman I was supposed to pray with but didn't, you might think this has to do with that. But it doesn't. Not really. 

This is another post about my newly-blind best friend. (My dog.) 

See, one of the things that has taken me most by surprise in all of this transition is how little attention she seems to have been paying to her life for the last 11 years. 

She has lived in the same house. With the same floors. With the furniture in the same places. With her food and water in exactly the same place. Going up and down the same 4 steps off the back deck and the front porch. Walking the same neighborhood streets. Crossing the same crosswalks. Peeing in the same little piece of easement at this one neighbor's house. (We even call it her potty spot.) 

Yet, she lost her sight, and she seems to have absolutely no clues remaining as to where she is. 

She's constantly walking into things. Things that haven't moved in 11 years. She can't find her food and water bowl. Like her nose doesn't know to alert her to these things. She skitter-foots every time she crosses the threshold from the laminate flooring to the old linoleum, like it's something weird and new. Like this whole big world she lives in, even this little part of it that I would have assumed she would be intimately familiar with, is completely foreign. 

Like her eyes have been literally the only thing she's been paying attention to for her whole life. 

Now that she needs her other senses, it's like she's never used them before. 

I can hold a piece of cheese in front of this dog's face, right in front of her nose, and she will still move her nose in a bunch of circles before she figures out where it is. I can put her at the edge of the stairs, and she won't know that the edge means it's time to step down. (She's learning....we're getting there.) I can take her for a walk and verbally identify landmarks for her - houses where other dogs live, fences she likes to sniff at - and she'll walk right into them anyway, like they aren't even there. Like she's never noticed them before in her life. 

It makes me think. 

It makes me wonder what the dominant things have been in my life that I've been depending on, what I trust to guide me. It makes me wonder how many other ways I'm experiencing the world at the same time without even paying attention to them. It makes me wonder if I'm paying attention at all, and how much attention I'm paying. 

I think it's a good time to stop and think about the ways I'm living and what they mean for the life I'm living and what they mean, most importantly, if the life I'm living somehow changes in some dramatic way.