The examined life

So, we come to the end of a month of nonstop posting. I'm glad I did it, because I had a lot of ideas accumulated from 8 years of existence and it was good to get them out, but I have to say that the biggest thing I've gotten out of this experiment has been an appreciation of what a horrible idea it is to blog every day. Blogging every day means you have to have something to write about every day, which means that every moment is spent analyzing, thinking, phrasing, and it's so exhausting that you miss the fun of just being. I was so worked up about not having anything to post yesterday that I almost walked right past an abandoned chicken wing! And once I spotted it, I was so caught up in thinking about how I was going to work this into a moral lesson for the blog, I hardly remembered to enjoy it.

Maybe it's because they are so sadly deficient in most of their sensory organs, but humans in general spend way too much time thinking. Particularly overeducated, citified humans like my mom. One of the great pleasures of being a dog is that you can just turn it all off--in fact, turned off is our default. Days go by in smells, and sounds, and veeerrry long dreams full of lambchops and 24 hour off-leash parks, and tummy rubs...and you don't have to think about what each smell means for the future of the planet, or what each tummy rub signifies in the interspecies dialogue. It's good to think about these things every once in a while, but really, I think once a week is sufficient. Constantly thinking just gets you stressed and grumpy and you miss out on having any experiences that would be worth thinking about, that might really produce some good ideas.

So one more piece of advice to the humans out there--one more suggestion from across the species divide: let the ideas, the posts, come to you at the pace that they want. One a week, max. The unexamined life might not be worth living, but the overly examined life isn't living at all.