Life lessons from the pup

A new arrival reminds Natalie Garrett how to learn much about a life of simplicity and joy.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

Life coaching can be tiring.

So finally, we caved. We bought the puppy. We had been strong and resolute in our parenting decision to say no in the face of almost daily requests over a period of probably three years. But when we moved out of London recently, we relented and got a puppy.

We have had him for nearly a month now. He’s 98 per cent fluff and utterly glorious. He is taking us back to the early days of having our own human puppies – you mustn’t let him out of your sight for a second or he’ll a) be literally under your feet so you tread on him, b) be eating something disgusting you didn’t know was hiding under the sofa or c) well, you can guess what c) is.

But what I hadn’t reckoned on, when I collected this beautiful ball of snuffliness from his breeder, was that he would turn into my life coach. I have learnt so much about life – and specifically how to live it well – in the last couple of weeks, just by watching the way he lives his life.

For our puppy, everything is an adventure.

“Someone’s opening a door! What excitement awaits on the other side?”

“Oh you’ve leant down to talk to me – maybe if I lie on my back, you will give my tummy a rub?”

And so on.

Occasionally, he expresses sadness because everyone’s left the room and he can’t follow us upstairs. But otherwise, his glass (or bowl) isn’t just half full, it’s brimming over. As long as he’s been fed, he’s warm, he’s been let out to do what a dog’s got to do and (most importantly) he’s been shown love and affection, he’s happy and trusting. And then falls asleep, paws akimbo.

Somewhere, I read that in the Bible there are 365 statements variously translated as “do not worry”, “do not be afraid”, “do not be anxious”. 365. One for every day of the year. And even if that rather neat number isn’t actually accurate (although how amazing if it were true), clearly the Bible has a recurring theme around worry, fear and anxiety. Perhaps this most human of conditions is not such a new phenomenon as we think. God has been addressing issues of mental health for hundreds and thousands of years.

Jesus talked about it a lot. He addressed it head on in one of his most famous teaching sessions:

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?’

In my puppy, I see (mercifully not a bird flying around) a creature who trusts that he’s going to be looked after. He trusts that he will have food and love so he is free to enjoy chasing a ball or chewing a stick. He models to me the very wisdom of Jesus. He doesn’t overcomplicate his life, he just lives it. As people, we seem to experience life as endlessly complicated. And, of course, sometimes it really is. Some of us carry all sorts of responsibilities that are very complicated indeed. Some of us don’t have our most basic needs met and that’s awful. I pray we can find and help those around us in that situation. But for most of us, most of the time, life really isn’t that complicated. If we have enough food, clothes on our back, somewhere warm to shelter and someone to share love with, that’s a good life right there. If we are privileged to have our basic needs provided for then maybe we can worry less and enjoy more. But for some reason, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Like countless others, I have carried with me the shadow of depression for many years. Through CBT and other therapies, I have had to learn new ways of thinking to keep the light on, as it were, and the darkness at bay. In this battle, Jesus’ words provide powerful ballast against the tidal waves of the depressive storm. He encourages us to choose, by an act of will, to fill our minds with truth and with the evidence of good things: the promise of his faithful provision, thus forcing out the lies of the darkness. As we choose to fill our minds with the knowledge and love of God, there is less room for worry and anxiety and we find rest for our minds. This choice brings freedom and the space for joy to grow. And, as we have come to realise in recent years, this battle is real for all of us, in different ways and to different extents.

Wonderfully, my puppy seems to have excellent mental health. When Winston Churchill spoke of his own “black dog”, I don’t think he was talking about a bouncing ball of fur begging for a tummy rub. But as I fill my mind with thoughts of Jesus and my puppy, I will continue to learn much about a life of simplicity and joy. And I am grateful to my children, wise beyond their years, who were instrumental in bringing this puppy/life coach into our family.

Article

Books

Change

Mental Health

17 June 2024

5 min read

Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.

The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives.

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time.

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time.