Choice versus Chance
The woman asked me what trait I am looking for in a dog and I said, “Kindness. The same thing I look for in a human.”
How does a dog show kindness? I believe it is obvious. I have known sweet dogs that make me kinder and I’ve known aggressive dogs that make me irritated and aggressive myself.
I’m looking for a dog or let’s just put it in the parlance of the day, I’ve opened myself up to a dog. I’m coming to the finish line of this difficult financial year and I’ve been avoiding any complex financial consideration so that I could get to where I am now and that is on the upswing. Thankfully I have more work and 2014 is looking more robust than this year.
And that means I have started thinking about a dog again.
As soon as I opened the doggy door, I’ve had encounters. Tin and I drove to Belle Chasse to see a dog named Edward, who had one blue eye and one brown eye and growled at Tin when he went to pet him. An instant no. Then there was the blind Jack Russell that gave me pause because it meant to me blind destruction of my house. Then there was Major – a throwback because he was not a good fit for one owner and perhaps he was a good fit for me – “He eats rocks. You don’t have rocks around there in New Orleans, so you don’t have to worry about it. But he needed an operation to dislodge a rock. His father ate rocks too.”
And there was 6-year-old Chance – good in all ways but his propensity to stand guard at the door and dictate how things would ebb and flow. A “GREAT” fit for me and my son. But I dwelled on Chance and I couldn’t get there.
So last night, after seeing the photograph of a sweet girl who walks like an angel, I knew we had found our puppy.
I was thrilled. But then I weighed the costs and I couldn’t square those with our reality. There is the trampoline I want to get for Tin for his birthday. There is Santa, Kwanzaa and his birthday and there are bills and ongoing items that need addressing and the angel was beginning to stress me out – my heart was saying yes, but my head was saying not now.
I’m not good with choices. I’ve come around to believing that I’ve always been someone who just wished someone else would come in magically and say, “Rachel, if you do this, that will be good. Or don’t do that because it will end up bad.” And I’ve kicked myself unmercifully for choices I’ve made that have turned out to be bad choices. “Who knew?” I ask myself time and time again, it could have gone this way or that, and it went that way. Who knew? This time though, I made my choice not to go with what my heart dictated – the little angel puppy who glides across the floor and looks as cute as any puppy dares – and I said to myself, Rachel I said, she could be the heartbreaker – but all of your choices are good ones because you make them and if it turns out that your choice this time leads you astray, then you will come to understand later why you made it and why at the time, this was the right choice because it led you here, to this moment, which is exactly where you are supposed to be no matter how things seem to appear.
