PhotoCredit: OnTheRoad
For 12 years I had a sidekick. A golden retriever named Rugby, who I dare say a number of you knew. He was a very special dog who gave a lot of love to a lot of people. I miss him every day.
When we were told he was sick, “bad sick”, it felt surreal. I remember thinking it made no sense that pets couldn’t live forever. It seemed very unfair. A grand injustice with my name on it.
These moments seem the perfect opportunity to fall apart. To remove ourselves from the world and wallow. To curl up in a ball of self-pity and die a little. But something else grabbed me. A different energy took hold. I decided we needed to have adventures. So I booked weekly Friday excursions and started planning weekend getaways.
Friday’s were just for Rugby and me. We would just go do something fun and new. We explored LA, we made ordinary chores fun and we made time for things I hadn’t made time for before.
On weekends we would pack up the car with a million Rugby-things and drive somewhere not too far. Rugby never liked long car rides. We would find new coffee shops, pizza joints and - most importantly - pet stores.
We turned trauma into life. It felt powerful at the time and it’s beyond meaningful now. His final months are a blur of happy memories.
There are lots of moments in life that feel traumatic. A collection of unwanted inconveniences that seem more than we can handle or more than we want to handle. We can find ways to numb ourselves to the world or we can find ways to pump life into those moments.
Look at your problem through the lens of what you have, not what you want. We all have an abundance of resources, the trick is to look harder at the solution than the problem. When we find the adventure in whatever life throws at us, we discover positivity, optimism, resilience and strength. We also find life.