I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
My sisters and I have wondered what will become of my father’s dog when he can no longer take care of her. And now that has turned from hypothetical to reality. My dad had a bad fall when he was weak from flu recently. Since then he has been hospitalized and now he’s in a rehab facility. He lives with his partner Hilde1, who was recently pulled down by the dog and badly bruised, when the dog (let’s call her Kristy) lunged at some other dogs who provoked her.
Kristy is a ten-year-old standard poodle. She’s adorable and lively and provides so much love to my dad and Hilde in their senior living apartment. But they can no longer walk her safely, even for the short walks to go outside and pee that she takes twice a day in addition to longer walks with a pro dog walker.
I said, “I’ll take Kristy and let’s see how it goes.” I have two cats and a dog of my own, which poses a challenge in integrating Kristy. She’s never lived with cats so we don’t know how she might treat them. She gets along well with my dog Bo though, fortunately.
I felt ambivalent about proposing that Dad and Hilde can’t keep the dog anymore, but after some protests, my dad agreed the current situation was unworkable. ChatGPT provided me some backup, saying “In eldercare ethics, safety trumps preference when the preference leads to foreseeable harm. This is exactly such a case.”
I could never forgive myself if Kristy caused Hilde to fall again, or pulled my Dad down when he’s already struggling to regain strength and function after a fall.
I welcome Kristy’s presence in my family. She gives me a project to tackle, both engaging and challenging.
In Dharmette: Stories of Practice (3 of 5) Wholeheartedness, Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal addresses work as a practice:
So one of the really invaluable areas of practice for me was something that at the San Francisco Zen Center they called work practice, that the work we did was considered as equal in value to practice as meditation. And so learning about practicing in the activity of work has been invaluable for me, and one represented very meaningful turning points for me in this regard. I’d been at Tassajara for maybe about eight, nine months at the monastery, and it was rare to be able to leave. I wasn’t actually supposed to leave the first year, but I had occasion to leave. And on the way back, the driver stopped at a big shopping mall or shopping center in Carmel, California, just before we go up into the deep into the mountains, National Wilderness, where the monastery is.
And there was a bookstore. And I went into the bookstore. I had very little time. So I went to the section of the bookstore where they had spiritual books, and they had a section on kind of Eastern spirituality, Eastern religions. And I pulled out a book at random because I had very little time, and I opened it randomly, and I read a sentence that said something like this, “The problems humans have is that they hold themselves back.”
He continues, sharing how we hold ourselves back from full attention to the work we do:
So this is one of the really important lessons I learned from my Zen monastic life: that work practice—what we do with our daily life—and how we give ourselves over to it matters. We don’t hold back. We participate in what we’re doing. If you’re doing it anyway, participate. Give it wholeheartedness.
It doesn’t have to be fast. It doesn’t have to be strained. It doesn’t have to be overdone.It can be very relaxed and simple—but give all of yourself. Don’t hold any of yourself back.
You’re too important to divide yourself between doing something half-hearted and having the other half-heart doing something that’s really not necessary. You’re so important that you deserve to include all of yourself in what you do.
That’s what I’m doing with Kristy. I’m not holding back. I’m throwing myself into integrating her into my family, learning about introducing cats and dogs, taking it slowly and deliberately, making this work through my work. I’m approaching this challenge wholeheartedly.
- Not her real name. ↩︎