I’ve been absent for a long time. The road of life hit a detour that directed me way off course. Last summer I thought I was back on the main route; things were looking more optimistic. The time was right, and the planets aligned; we adopted a puppy! We were flying high on hopes and plans. Reality set in rapidly. Adopting a puppy ten months ago has taught me much about life. For example, the internet is full of speculative facts. Life is full of disappointments, no doubt because everyone sets their expectations too high.
The internet’s deceptions
Bernie isn’t my first puppy. Clearly, I named this site after his predecessor. He is the most challenging creature I have ever had the pleasure of sharing a life with. The boy is constant work, constant training, and constant supervision.
There has been a lot of training, 10 months of training. We’ve looked all over the internet, we’ve read books, we’ve watched hours of training videos on YouTube. He still only listens when he feels like it, but he’s a beagle, it’s their thing. I looked to Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok; there is advice and criticism everywhere. Everybody’s got the answers, and when their advice doesn’t work, it’s our fault. The internet is a virtual landfill of bad advice. Bernie is the first puppy I’ve raised with the opinions and judgments of the whole world breathing down my neck. Social media bombards me with images of dogs being perfect.
Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a fabulous resource. Still, when social media convinces the masses to commit check fraud, the masses need to be more discerning . All the answers to raising a civil sane puppy don’t necessarily come from the internet. Expensive training doesn’t always work either. Sometimes we must figure out what works on our own.
Life is full of disappointments
Bernie was supposed to be a positive addition to our life. He was supposed to go hiking, camping, and kayaking with us. A new puppy was supposed to be a companion on our outdoor adventures. He was supposed to snuggle with us in the quiet times.
As I sit here typing, I’m nursing a bite wound on my hand, the result of my interfering in the killing of his first chipmunk of the morning. Yep, first…he’s killed two so far this morning. He’s 27 pounds of raw energy. Our missile with 4 paws seems to have some moral aversion to sleep. He won’t stop, he can’t close his eyes…he can’t stop running.
I didn’t sign up for this puppy. My little friend gets too overstimulated if we take him on long hikes. We can’t travel too far from the car. We tried to kayak. He was good for about five minutes on first trip. On the second trip, he tried to jump out of the kayak to chase a squirrel on the shore.
Aside from “killing machine”, I haven’t seen too much of a personality from him. Not only does he not like to cuddle, but he also doesn’t really like people. He really doesn’t look to us as more than food dispensers. And then, of course, he bit me; that really makes me sad.
That’s life though. We didn’t know what we were getting when we picked him. He was five weeks old when we saw him for the first time. There were clues, but our hopes were high. Life is full of disappointments, right? I thought after I graduated from college I would be a respected marine researcher. A few years later, when I graduated with a master’s degree, I thought then I’d be a research scientist.
I’m not alone. A 2022 Pew research study calculated that 41% of recent college graduates were under-employed. In other words, doing jobs that don’t depend upon a degree. LinkedIn has that number as 52%. Like I said, life is full of disappointments.
Lower your expectations
If you’ve read this far you may have concluded that I had my expectations too high from the outset. He was a baby dog, a blank slate. I couldn’t expect him to be a perfect puppy from day one. He learns, but he has a temperament that doesn’t allow him to rest. When he sleeps, he’s not a bad little guy. When he’s not bloody with chipmunk guts he’s a beautiful dog too.
It seems like holding our expectations too high can lead to a lot of negativities in life. There is something positive to having high expectations, we can make ourselves better, and also show others we view highly of them. My expectations are high for everyone, including myself. In personal and business relationships, and it seems even with my puppy. Successful people tell us that high expectations are the key to success. Psychologists tell us that these same expectations lead to disappointment and failure. High expectations fit in a very small window.
So, I must learn to lower my expectations, for both of us, and be more understanding of our challenges. We will grow and learn from each other.
The take home
Bernie is a beautiful puppy, isn’t he? He’s smart, he’s active, he’s super frustrating. He is worthy to continue Darwin’s legacy. He’s also just one year old, he will calm down, I hope.
In the meantime, I’m going to take these lessons he taught me and apply them to life. As I read over what I have written, I noticed that these lessons are entangled. We grow disappointed with life when our expectations are set too high. We have these high expectations because of deceptions peddled on the internet.
Life is a work in progress, Darwin wasn’t a perfect dog and he lived 16 years! Bernie has a long life ahead to learn how to be his own “person”.
