If you didn't get a chance to read the first article in the Sable-series, please click here to read Zen and the Art of Elder Dog Care; Part 1 - Awareness.

Zen and the Art of Elder Dog Care

Part 2 – Caring

By Maryanne Pope

 “We can dramatically change the quality of our lives when we consciously seek to restore serenity to our daily endeavours.” – Sarah Ban Breathnach

Amen sister! But HOW?

“When women stop behaving as if they were whirling dervishes.” – Sarah Ban Breathnach

‘Kay . . . got that lesson drilled into me. Looking after Sable didn’t leave me much choice. I made the decision to keep her alive after she lost her sight; I damn well had to learn how to look after her properly, which demanded that I slow down.

Trust me: other than driving, you can’t do a heck of a lot quickly with a twelve-year-old deaf and blind German Shepherd in tow . . . well, except for learning patience: that comes quickly.

“Patience, patience, patience is what the sea teaches . . . patience and faith.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

I hadn’t yet arrived at the sea — but in the meantime, my dog certainly seemed to be trying to teach me patience and faith. Serenity, however, was another matter.

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For being patient with Sable didn’t automatically remove the underlying panic that lurked below the surface of my slower-moving exterior. If anything, at first I found that being forced to physically slow down actually caused my anxiety to increase exponentially. At least when I was in busy-bee mode — zooming around, attempting much and accomplishing not so much — I had the illusion of living purposefully.

Slowing down, however, was going to entail far more ‘being’ than ‘doing’ . . . and this, I soon realized, was not a skill to be mastered overnight. In fact, rather like a drug addict trying to quit cold-turkey, being yanked out of busyness was initially akin to withdrawal. When a mind obsessed with checking tasks off a list begins to ask the bigger questions about one’s life, the lure of the daily details soon becomes all-consuming again.

Here’s a snippet of what my monkey-mind was chattering on about during the move from Calgary to Victoria: would Sable make it through the mountains before the pressure in her remaining eye spiked? With her history of bleeding issues, when the time came would she survive the inevitable second eye-removal surgery? Would I be able to find a suitable place to live within our new six-week timeline? Would my Visa be paid off in time to pay the movers? And on and on . . . perhaps you know the drill :)

 Similar to the sea, it would seem that patience and faith are not permanent . . . they come and go like the ebb and flow of the tide. But it all worked out beautifully and as I settled into my new life and home in the town of Sidney by the Sea on Vancouver Island, I returned again to one of my favourite authors for wisdom on this serenity business.

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“Today we must start to recover our sanity,” writes Sarah Ban Breathnach in her book, Simple Abundance; A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. “And the way to do this is to concentrate slowly on completing one task at a time, each hour of the day, until the day is over . . . we will act ‘as if’ we are serene by bringing all our attention and conscious awareness to whatever we are doing . . . and what we will gain from this exercise is the inner peace that comes from living fully in the present moment.”

This sounded lovely but I could never seem to get the hang of it in daily life. Ever since I was a kid, my natural tendency had been to spend the present moment thinking or worrying about future moments. And because of the path I chose after John’s death, much of my last decade was spent thinking, writing, and speaking about the past. But last summer, I began to realize that at some point in the fairly near future, due to Sable’s age if nothing else, the future wasn’t going to include her. And since the present was where she was, that’s where, at long last, I began to learn to live.

Well, sort of — for old habits die hard. Which might be why the Universe sent in the big guns (a completely dependent creature) to get through to one of its, er, slower students (that would be me) on the finer points of slowing down and being in the moment — which bring us back to the Zen-portion of the program. 

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