Distraction

One thing I’ve been doing a lot during this pandemic is walking with my dog, Marty. I love to walk, she loves to sniff, and we both love to be outside so it works well. One thing this dog tends to do is use her sniffer to seek out anything she might deem a tasty treat. Sadly, we get quite a bit of litter out our way. It’s mostly beer cans, tiny Fireball bottles, and wrappers from gas station sandwiches, but just in the last week or so she’s found an entire Wendy’s Frosty (for the record, she didn’t get to eat any of that because I saw it before she did, but she tried) and a chicken bone which she did eat part of (and this isn’t the first time–honestly, who eats chicken in the car and then just tosses the bones out the window? That just seems like a difficult car snack…).

I do try to keep an eye out so I can steer her around the things she might want to eat, because even though she’s pretty good with “leave it” inside the house, when we’re outside all bets are off and she “leaves” nothing. I think it probably stems back to her “stray days”–as far as we know, Marty was a stray in Oklahoma before she ended up in a shelter there, and was subsequently brought up to a shelter here. Luckily, she seems to have a pretty strong system because even part of a plastic bag that she ate once (because it seemed to have food smeared in it) didn’t affect her at all.

So, yesterday, we were out on a nice long walk through a nearby neighborhood after a couple days that were cold enough that I didn’t even take her on my daily runs. I had gotten a text from The Bearded One during this walk, and was responding, so I wasn’t as attentive to our surroundings as I usually am, when all of a sudden someone walked out of their house and shut the door loudly. Poor Marty hasn’t gotten a lot of interaction with people other than The Bearded One and I except on Tuesdays when she goes to doggy daycare, so a new person was exciting stuff. I looked up from my phone when I heard the person’s door shut too, and then I glanced at the road in front of us where less than two feet from my pooch’s nose was what might be considered a Holy Grail of canine hoovers: part of a doughnut. I don’t know if someone got tired of it and threw it out the window (doughnut sacrilege) or if they’d taken their treat with them on a walk and accidentally dropped it (doughnut heartbreak), or what, but there it was. In the middle of the street. And my dog, who would normally smell something of that caliber from several yards away, passed within inches of this thing without ever noticing it. I even turned around and went back to take a picture of it, and she was still so interested in the guy who had walked around his house to his back yard out of view that she missed out on this fat/sugar bomb right in front of her.

And that made me think about goals and distractions. For my dog, sniffing around gives her a real shot at scoring some exciting yummies. But when she took her eye off the prize (or, in this case, her nose off the ground) she missed out on an opportunity. And I’m sure I do the same thing. I feel like I’m always sniffing around, trying to find some side hustle that will fulfill me in a way my other jobs may not (or at least could net me some extra income), and then I get distracted by something that has nothing to do with my goals, and I probably miss out on ideas or chances that might really lead to something great. And maybe the chances I miss wouldn’t be good for me, anyway (clearly doughnuts aren’t the best thing for a dog), but they might turn out to be exactly what I’ve been looking for.

I started listening to the Super Soul Conversations podcast with Oprah Winfrey recently, and in one episode she talked to Paulo Coelho, author of the best-selling book, The Alchemist. I started reading The Alchemist years ago, and I don’t think I was quite ready to read it then. But in this podcast episode, Oprah and Paulo talked about The Alchemist, and what it says about figuring out what we should do with our lives. Or, to use the language of the book, finding our “personal legend”. Around 25:38 in this episode, Oprah says, “I love that you talk about the ‘language of the omens’ because ‘the omens’ or ‘signs’…are everywhere, all the time. All the time. Everywhere. And so the boy, Santiago [the main character in the book], learns to follow the signs.” Like Santiago, I need to learn to follow the signs in my own life. I often look for them, and I even notice them a lot of the time now, but I need to get better at actually following them instead of getting distracted by something that may briefly seem more exciting. So I think I’m going to go back and read The Alchemist again, and see if I can get more tips on discovering my own “personal legend”. And Marty…well, her distraction was short lived. She was back to “following the signs” by the time we got to the end of the block.