There’s
a saying that is built upon the idea that pets reflect their owners.
This is supposed to be especially true when it comes to dogs,
but it covers a lot of ground. Dogs can have shaggy long hair
and birds can swear with the best of us.
I
sometimes wonder about that. Mainly because there’s all sorts
of ways that the concept can be shifted slightly and be proven
accurate (or just accepted as true when there’s nothing to it
at all). I wonder if it’s an intentional type of thing, where
we gravitate toward certain preferences… if it’s a self-fulfilling
type of thing, where some type of idea or awareness creates a
path to bring it about… if it’s just a pure coincidence, and honestly
nothing but we read meaning into it.
I
have plenty of friends that dress their pets up a certain way.
They use their favorite colors for colors and leashes. They include
them in group costumes for Halloween. If you expand on it enough,
add enough purple to a shirt and leash and sunglasses and collar,
a visual connection can be obvious and compelling and manipulated
into evidence for the ownership mirror test.
For
me, I always see moments where we pick up behaviors from each
other. All of my dogs have had a very strong understanding of
bedtime. Many nights, they’d begin their trudge to claim a spot
on the bed as soon as a television remote was picked up, never
mind waiting until the television had actually been turned off
or anyone had actually begun moving.
This,
however, is not an essay about pets.
That
was just an observation to kick things off.
Instead,
it is about how certain situations, environments, all of that
and more, can create a certain result. Kind of an action-reaction
arrangement.
Weird
example, but it begins to bring the overall whole together a bit…
If
you live in Orlando or Buffalo, you probably don’t think there
is much in common as far as reactions to the weather. Sunshine
and heat that turns asphalt into puddles and dry clothes into
swamps. Weekends of snowfall measured in feet and bitterly cold
air that pounds immediate distraction into the ability to hold
a thought clearly for more than a quarter of a second. What could
possibly connect those two extremes?
Folks
in Florida will tell you that the way to survive the heat is easy.
You don’t go outside. You’d be silly to even think about heading
outside if you didn’t need to be there.
Any
guesses how those folks in western, central and upstate New York
handle blizzards? Yeah. That’s right. They stay inside.
Opposite
ends of the extremes, with remarkably similar approaches.
Where
this whole train of thought slides off onto unexpected tracks
is that a dog immediately looking for a treat after coming inside
and a visit to Tom Sawyer Island on an unforgivingly humid day
had me thinking about stories involving a car and a clutch.
(I
know. Try to let me have this, we’re arrived at a fork in the
road and I’m about to head off to the right.)
The
little nugget floating around and crashing into things throughout
this process has been an idea about how each of us can do amazingly
common and similar things in vastly different ways. For that,
consider the clutch of a car.
As
a rolling collection of wearable parts, nothing sums it up more
completely than a “your mileage may vary” disclaimer. How you
drive influences the miles you get per gallon. It determines how
quickly the brakes wear out. You make decisions that determine
how long the washer fluid lasts.
And
all of these things are also subject to conditions and circumstances
and countless ideas beyond your control. A storm messes up the
streets with a wintry mix, and you’re spending the next few days
spritzing the windshield to get the salt cleared away. Not your
fault. But compare it to the person in Arizona that perhaps hasn’t
turned on their windshield wipers in months, and your decision
on where to live and heading outside most definitely was involved.
But
we could be talking about the amount of sugar you put in your
coffee or the syrup you use on your pancakes. This could be about
your use of nails, screws, tacks or whatever to hang pictures
on the wall. Do you have a garden or use cords of firewood?
Pancakes,
screws and cucumber plants are all perfectly normal ideas. If
someone said they grew their own parsley, green peppers and strawberries
every year, you wouldn’t consider it in any way strange. Some
people prefer waffles.
We
overlap similarities and separate differences and do so quite
often without even being distracted by them taking place. They
just do. None of it moves the needle on the strangeness meter
at all.
We
all have shopping lists, and yet none of us have even remotely
close to the same shopping lists.
Perhaps
that explains how three people can drive the same car, drive quite
comparable routes on a daily basis, but each person consistently
needs to fill the tank at a different pace. It’s more than the
stoplights and the traffic and the distance covered on the highways.
We
don’t all behave the same, and that is more than ok. It’s the
reality. There isn’t a central, single theme here in this essay.
I’ve covered the ground between dogs that won’t share the covers
and know where the treats are stored to brake pads and wiper blades.
All in some sort of attempt to say that everyday life isn’t so
everyday. There’s no pure normal. It’s how we use things as individuals
that determine how versatile and effective and different anything
can be.
So,
here’s to the multitasking equipment and the decisions we make,
to our ability to get what we need often without having everything
we want. May there always be one last piece of cake to find when
you open the fridge.