My Dog, My Mirror

A lesson in patience, found at the end of a leash.

Around late March or early April, Portland is just busting with spring. The temperatures get warmer, and the smells of blossoming trees are so fragrant it’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Those warmer temperatures mean longer, slower walks with Chase.

Why slower? Because with the new smells and sounds, Chase comes alive with a totally different kind of energy. He’s a mix of Jack Russell and Rat Terrier, which means he’s high-energy, strong-willed, and knows what he likes. In spring, “what he likes” is everything.

Every smell, every fly, every squirrel, every bird, suddenly becomes the most important mission in the world.

This is that high-energy, strong-willed focus. Even when he’s being held, he’s ‘on’... always looking for the next mission.

While I’m trying to keep a steady, meditative pace, he is darting, zigzagging from left to right. A fly will cause him to stop dead in front of me, without warning, and he’s suddenly on a new quest... that is, until he sees something else that is even more interesting.

It can be a LOT.

And as I was wrestling with the leash on one of those spring walks, bracing against another sudden lunge, a thought hit me: This is what daily life must feel like for my husband.

I have severe ADHD. I’ll wake up in the morning, ready to tackle a mission I’d gone to sleep thinking about. But then, without warning, I’ll get distracted by one thing, then another, and another, completely forgetting about the project I started with.

My high energy, my shifting focus, my impatience. It’s the same pattern I see in Chase.

The same people who find me a little bit difficult to take often find him a little difficult to take, too. We’ve often been referred to as an old married couple, the way we appear to bicker and mirror each other’s distractions.

And then there’s this. A good reminder that even in all the chaos, there’s a need for warmth and patience... for him, and for me.

When Chase chose us at the rescue facility six years ago, I had no idea of the similarities between our personalities. I thought my job was to learn patience with him. But that’s not the real lesson.

In this little, chaotic, strong-willed dog, I see a mirror. And in learning to be more patient with him, to give him the grace to be who he is, I am ever so slowly, learning how to be more patient with myself.

It’s funny, the mirrors life gives us, and the lessons we find holding the other end of the leash.

-R. Michael