The basic emotion is fear
A friend gave me a book for my birthday a while back – it was Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human. Tatjana ended up reading it before me and it is still on my nightstand as my reading time has been narrowed down to two sentences a night. But I’ve become aware of Temple as T told me most of what the book was about and I heard an interview with her and Terry Gross. I like that she says not to pat an animal – how many people go up to their dogs and pat them on the hips – they don’t like that. They like to be stroked, long and deep, like a mother’s tongue – that is soothing to them.
More importantly, I like that she is working in the world of livestock and showing people how to handle animals – even if they are being raised for food. She makes pig farmers more humane, and even teaches chicken farmers how to handle chickens. Her main premise is that because of her autism she thinks in images much the same way that animals do and so she is able to be more intuitive around animals than the normal person. And while images and emotions rule an animals life, fear is the primal emotion. She’s really incredible to listen to and she makes me thinks about two things that have been weighing heavy on my mind.
1. Expanding who you are and what you do.
The other day with a group of friends we jokingly said, what if everything you said was in meter. And I recalled an attorney who used to send all his correspondence in iambic pentameter. But more closely to what I’m thinking is that I was in the park this morning and there was a dog who had just gone through surgery because he had fallen off a bed and become paralyzed. The owner was telling me that he had been referred to a vet in Mandeville who had hooked him up with a specialist in Mississippi. The vet was someone who had enlarged his practice to accommodate the poor. He made it a part of his practice to make sure poor people with animals had access to good veterinary care. I like this idea. Expanding who you are and what you do.
2. Fear is the basic emotion
I was talking to some friends about this situation that arose with my niece, where her husband wrongfully accused me and that it had escalated into this situation. While I have chosen to just let all of chips fall where they fell instead of actively seeking a reconciliation I do know that most of what all of this was about falls under one category – fear. My niece fearing threat to her marriage, her husband fearing he had inappropriate feelings for me, others in the family fearing something might upset their order, and my fearing that if I did attempt to work it out that I would have to be defending myself against a lie, thereby giving the person who perpetrated it credence, the people who believed it an excuse, and that basically I fear validating any of this nonsense.