The delicate art of musturbation

This morning I found myself musing about when was best to take the dogs for a morning run. I’d just read a book that said dogs should have two walks a day so had decided to try to fit a morning run into my schedule. ‘Maybe I should have taken them when I first got up instead of walking round the yard with them,’ I thought. ‘Maybe I should have taken them before I made my breakfast.’ When I heard the ‘should’ word popping up more than once my mental ears pricked up. This is often a sign that I’m ‘musturbating’ – putting pressure on myself to meet a high standard or finding fault with what I’ve done, something I experienced all too often when I was growing up.

I’m not automatically opposed to using the word ‘should’. Most of the time it’s fine, just a recognition of something that happened, like ‘I should have brought the washing in when the sky clouded over and it wouldn’t have got wet’. I think it’s easy to get too religiously strict about using ‘should’, like the friend of mine who once told me ‘that woman says ‘should’ all the time – she should know that she shouldn’t say ‘should’ ‘! When it gets that prescriptive the point is lost. Which is that ‘shoulding’ can be a way of beating myself up that makes me feel bad.

So this morning I asked myself ‘have I crossed the line into self-criticism here?’ The answer seemed to be ‘no, not quite’. I could tell this because I didn’t feel bad or harassed. I was still at the stage of thinking about things in a neutral way, trying to work out what time would work best for the dogs’ run. In the end I decided that it did make more sense to take them after breakfast. But it reminded me how easily ‘should’ can slip into ‘musturbation’ and become a stick we beat ourselves up with.

Can pets make you happy?

Can spending time with a pet make you happy? I know I feel happy when I just look at my very special brain damaged white cat (except when he wakes me up at 4.30am meowing to have his jellymeat refreshed). But I hadn’t thought about pets as an antidote to depression until a friend (none other than the anonymous Mr F) handed me a chapter from Healing without Freud or Prozac the other day. In it author Dr David Servan-Schreiber quotes studies showing that people are happier when they have contact with animals. One study found that older people had much better psychological resistance to life’s difficulties when they had a pet. Another discovered that Aids patients were much better protected from depression if they had a cat or dog. Lastly, people who were housebound due to a disability and virtually unable to move round unaided were much happier if they had a dog as a companion. Not only that, but they had more friends and more contact with relations than people in similar circumstances who did not have a dog. Apparently just having an animal by your side makes you more attractive to others. (Daters take note!)

Dr Servan-Schreiber also went into the benefits of animal companionship for physical health, which were considerable – lower death rates after heart attacks, going to the doctor less often, and lower blood pressure. Intellectually, people with pets and health problems were sharper too, doing better on stressful activities like mental arithmetic and public speaking, and making fewer mistakes in their work. Overall, it appears you just can’t lose owning a pet. I know that every day one of my three pets does something that makes me laugh. Barney barndog has just discovered that if he plonks his paw down in the water of a stream it splashes up and he can drink it. Watching him work this out had me laughing out loud. India, the dog next door, a Staffy-Ridgeback cross built like a tank and made of muscle (very like the dog in the picture to the left), likes to climb into my lap and be pampered and groomed like a little poodle. The look of bliss on her ugly mutt makes me smile all over. The cats do that classic cat thing of going to jump on something and missing, then getting a look on their faces that says ‘oh that was completely deliberate – I meant to do that’. And it’s delightful on a cold morning to have my special cat snuggle down under the blankets and purr by my side. So do pets make you happy? Apparently the answer is yes.

A low flying UPO lights up my life

Today a low flying UPO swooped into my garden and lit me up. That’s an Unexpected Positive Occurrence, not an Unidentified Plying Object. I was just about to walk the dog – which since I started using an anti-pulling lead has been more like ‘sit the dog’ as he refuses to move when it’s on – when Bianca, the little girl across the road, spotted me at the gate.
‘Hi, Kaye,’ she called out in her sweet four year old voice.
‘Hi, Bianca,’ I called back. ‘I’m just walking Barney – do you want to come?’

Bianca has a special interest in Barney. He was originally her dog, until it became clear that keeping him in her family’s unfenced yard was going to be a logistical nightmare. I had suggested I take him on, as I have a fully fenced yard and it would mean Bianca could still see lots of him. Bianca had been very generous about her dog, saying 'Kaye I would like Barney to come and live with you and for you to be his new Mum'. So it seemed the ideal solution. Ideal until Barney went from being the sweet little dog he was at Bianca’s to being the bitey little beast he is at my place.

‘Careful Bianca,’ I warned her when she reached us. ‘He’s a bit bitey.’
But to my surprise Barney was completely docile with her. His tail went into overdrive as she kissed and petted him. I stood by protectively but Barney didn’t bite, jump or act aggressively in any way. Rather, in Bianca’s presence he became again the lovely little dog he used to be, affectionate and playful. It simply reinforced to me that his biting was due to something I was accidentally doing.

‘We could go to the park,’ Bianca suggested with a winsome look and smile. She loves going to the park and has a genius for getting what she wants. I suspect that’s how she got her puppy. Barney was actually walking now that Bianca was with us so I thought ‘why not?’ Once maternal permission was granted we piled into the car. At the park Bianca slid, hid, climbed on the monkey bars and generally had a ball. So did Barney, and to my surprise, so did I. Barney walked, played, licked our faces, sat on my lap and never once tried to bite. The anger and fear I sometimes felt towards him melted away as he became again the dog I liked in the presence of his little friend. ‘Barney is basically a good dog,’ I thought. ‘I just have to find a way of helping him be that good dog with me.’ I felt so grateful to Bianca for coming into our afternoon and lighting it up, for helping me to feel good about the dog again. It was a classic UPO – an Unexpected Positive Occurrence coming at me without warning out of a clear blue sky.

HAVE YOU HAD A UPO FLY INTO YOUR LIFE?

If so I'd love to hear about it - just post it using the 'comment' function below.

Never give up - never surrender

It’s a gorgeous sunny winter day (the upside of global warming). I have a fire going to warm the icy corners of the living room, but my view as I sit at the computer is of a bushy green tree with olive tints in the neighbor's yard, dappled with sunlight, blowing in the wind. As I sit I muse over the problem with the dog. From being a playful, docile little puppy almost three weeks ago he has gone to being an aggressive, bitey little beast. I know this is what IT people call a ‘user problem’ – the fact that this happened after he came to live with me cannot be a coincidence. I watched him grow up at the house across the road and he never bit anyone there. This is not what I envisaged when I offered to buy the dog because they were having difficulty keeping it on their unfenced property.

But I will not be giving up any time soon. If there’s one thing I have learned from three decades of learning to transform depression into happiness, it is (as they say on that goofy film Galaxy Quest) to ‘never give up – never surrender’. (I think Winston Churchill might have said something similar during WWII, although his version went something like ‘never, never, never, never give in’ and wasn’t applauded by aliens on their inter-galactic space ship. As far as we know.) I’ve learned that while tenacity does not guarantee success, it sure as hell makes it a lot more likely. I wouldn’t have achieved the happiness I have today if I hadn’t got up every time I fell over and tried again. In the immortal words of Chumba-Wumba:

I get knocked down
But I get up again
You’re never going to keep me down.

(They also sang ‘pissing the night away’ but that’s not so apt here. My apologies to those romantics who thought the lyric was ‘kissing the night away’). So it’s back to my bible – ‘The Dog Listener’ DVD with Jan Fennell – and on with the various techniques she suggests. Experience suggests that if I just keep trying and looking for new information I’ll solve this problem, just as I’ve solved the problem of my depression.