Gone Dog Gone

You'd be forgiven for mistaking this dog sitting on our new rug, in our newly renovated lounge as the one my family had, as it is almost identical, but it of course isn't. We lost ours just before Christmas last year, but we are dogsitting for one of my colleagues and will have this little, old girl with us overnight, while its owner moves home.

He came a couple hours ago and while still sniffing around to get his bearings, he is calm and seems to be settling in nicely. I do miss having a dog around and home feels more homey when there is a dog on the carpet, snoring away gently. These wire-haired dachshunds are great dogs too, as they are so well-natured and tend to have great personalities that connect well with people and, are fantastic with kids. She is struggling a little on the painted floors though.

A little disruption in the house can be a good things and as they say, a change is as good as a holiday. While I have had time off, I don't think I have really had much of a holiday for a couple years now, even though there has been a lot of change in that time. I guess the saying should be more that a positive change is as good as a holiday.

What is positive and negative can be tempered by time though, and there can often be a flippening between the two, where over time, the positive switches to negative or the negative moves into the realm of positive. Distance brings the possibility for perspective and reflection, and this can come through time or space distance.

Being away from a situation or a person can bring clarity to the conditions of when we are immersed into them. Distance might make the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind is also possible, or we discover that when we are out of the circumstance for a while, we ourselves change - for better or worse.

However, sometimes when we imagine a situation from a distance, we might have our opinions about it, but our perspective might not have the detail necessary to really make an informed appraisal. It is like looking at someone else's life and saying "I would..." without actually knowing all of the circumstances that would affect what we would do.

We are very good at imagining how something will be in our future and how it will make us feel yet, we aren't very good in general at accurately doing this. While we used past information to predict the future, we also don't take into consideration all of the other aspects that can affect outcomes, with us having very limited visibility on many of them. this means that while we do feel that we are considering the future well, we aren't actually building an accurate representation of that future, meaning the decisions we make are based on erroneous information.

And often, the decisions we make that carry the most risk are the ones that are the hardest to describe and imagine due to the uncertainty and complexity. For example, the feeling of a breakup at 15 years of age might be used to predict the feeling of a break up at 30, but that early experience was in a far simpler ecosystem, whereas later, there are potentially finances, property ownership, children and other factors that come into play. Yet, we often make our decisions today on past experience, without recognizing we are importing that experience from a vacuum and releasing it into the wild, where it is going to be subject to a range of pressures it has little to no experience with.

By predicting the future and imagining we are correct, it is common then common to build expectations attached to what we have envisaged. This opens us up to the potential for misalignment of what we have prepared for and perhaps feel entitled to, and the reality of what actually is. For example, back in the 90s there were a lot of courtroom drama shows and many people were influenced into becoming lawyers because of it. What they imagined themselves doing was screaming "I object" in a court of law, but the reality is that most lawyers spend their time as a desk with a stack of papers, never seeing the inside of a courtroom at all.

We build these mental ideals of our world and when reality doesn't match up, we can become disappointed, disillusioned and depressed. Not only this, in that idealized world we have built, we have imagined ourselves as being capable to handle it and when reality rolls round, we can find ourselves lacking, chasing, stressed. We might be able to survive still, but that doesn't mean our experience is going to be positive.

But looking back, those experiences in hardship might actually be what made our lives worth living at all, as they are poignant reminders of what we have faced and overcome. It might not be enjoyable to feel the pains of our past, the regrets and shortcomings, but there can be grace in failure when we acknowledge our own winding road, the adventure we took in life and all the scrapes, bruises and scar tissue we have collected along the way.

We are lazy by nature and we cut the corner and take the path of least resistance as often as we can, even if it leads to more hardship. This also affects the way we predict the future, for as we build our narrative of how things are going to be, we include information to support our ideal and omit information that is inconvenient to our imagined truth. Ultimately, this leads to degrees of incorrectness, but no one is ever going to be completely right, unless they view components in a vacuum - something many do when they say "I told you so".

The only way to predict the future is to create it, but our actions create our future all of the time. This means that the only way to create that future we have predicted, is to make it exactly as we have imagined it - an imagination that is based on poor memories, imperfect information and a desire to create ideals. This means that while trends might improve our accuracy in prediction, the future itself is very unpredictable in detail.

This means that at least from a personal perspective, we are all going to always face a spectrum of disruption in our lives as our expectations aren't going to be completely met. Dealing with this is one part of life we can't likely ever avoid, as is facing the fact that we are all, always wrong - but how wrong we are might vary a lot.

Like a dog's life, it is easy to act on instinct alone, but as our instincts are experience and past based, they aren't always going to illicit the best response for circumstances, as they are only going to act on the patterns they recognize, and the fear of what they don't. But what about all of the information that they never become aware of at all?

Yet we are told - listen to your gut.