Questions of Motivation – Life’s Lenses

There’s a dog that lives on my route to work. It’s a small dog, some kind of terrier I think, and it goes absolutely nuts every time I walk by. I have been scared out of my skin on numerous occasions as I’ve been ambling home, wandering along in a nice little world of my own. There’s nothing that gets your adrenal glands pumping and your heart racing quite like a sudden onslaught of yaps and scampering feet from the other side of a hedge. Sometimes I remember in advance and am able to prepare myself by sauntering over to the other side of the road but I can rarely sneak by. I expect he smells me or hears me, despite my expert attempts to avoid detection.

A personal disclaimer here, one that I’m sure will get me on some people’s black lists, but I don’t much care for dogs – there’s something about their slobbery, vocal eagerness that seems to turn me off – but I don’t hate them and I’m not usually scared of them. This one has started to get on my nerves a little bit though. Why can’t it just let me get to and from work without a verbal barrage? Why does it always have to bother me? Why can’t it just leave me in peace?

And then, one day, it stopped. I’m not quite sure why, but one day it just wasn’t there. I braced myself for the onslaught of yips and yaps, only to be met with silence. Had it moved? Had it died? Was it locked inside today, only to be unleashed on me again tomorrow? But another quiet day went by, and then another. Then a whole week, which turned into two. And, do you know what? A part of me started to miss that dog. And another part started to wonder if I’d misjudged its intentions. Because it had been regularly shattering my sense of peace, I had turned to inwardly grumbling about it but, perhaps, I’d got it all wrong. What if my assumption that it was grumpily protecting its personal patch – seeing off its daily intruder as best it could – was incorrect? What if it was really, actually, excited to see me? What if its yaps of defiance and deterrence were actually yaps of greeting and acceptance? Had I been doing this little dog a disservice for all these weeks?

Perhaps I will never know, but it did get me thinking another thing: how often do I do it in other situations? How often do I assume the worst about somebody or something when, in actual fact, the someone or something is actually a good thing or just trying to be nice? How often do I filter the world around me through lenses of suspicion or big strap-on half-empty glasses when my world’s glasses could actually be brimming over?

Like I said, I may never know about that little dog – he still hasn’t returned – but I’m sure there are lots of other things I could see the positive in, if only I allowed myself to look at them a little bit differently.