A moment of clarity at the dog park

Early this year, we got a pandemic puppy from the San Francisco SPCA to replace Luna, our beloved Boston terrier who died last year. Our new pup, Topaz, is much more DOG than Luna ever was, part lab, part pit, part mutt, 50 pounds at eight months old, tail thumping and licking and gnawing, surface surfing for scraps, spectacular high jumps and a big muscular chest that pulls you along like a freight train. Doesn’t bark much, which is good. Pulled Angie over chasing after a couple of kids and broke her elbow, which is bad. A lot of work and a lot of early mornings.

But I mean, how can you say no to this?

So I’ve found myself taking Topaz to the dog park most days. There’s a park near our house, Upper Douglass, which features a wide open field overshadowed on two sides by a rocky cliff with a walking path for particularly rambunctious dogs and their terrified owners, and the other two sides by a chain link fence overlooking a spectacular view of the city, interspersed with tall spindly pines.

bliWatching the dogs play without much interference from their humans offers a lot of insight into human behavior. Groups of dogs break off from one another, focused momentarily on a singular task, like chasing a ball or another dog, or digging in a particularly aromatic hole. None of these tasks matter beyond the moment they’re engaged in them, but at the time the dogs take them very seriously and devote their full attention to them. Various canine personalities emerge. There are the social butterflies who cavort from group to group, temporarily throwing their all into a particular task then quickly getting distracted and moving on when the action gets slow. There are the aggressors, always trying to top the other dogs and show who’s boss. There are the taskmasters, focusing intently on a particular task at hand and goading other dogs into joining. There are the teases, waving a ball or stick in front of another dog to try and instigate a chase, and immediately losing interest if nobody follows. There are the referees or pundits, who don’t get involved themselves but run nearby, barking the whole time as if delivering instructions or commentary. Sometimes, a pair of particularly compatible dogs gets into a rhythm, sometimes topping, sometimes submitting, gnawing at each other’s faces and wrestling but never pushing it too far — the rules of the game are known to them, obscure to the humans, like Olympic sports would be to an alien. There are the observers who stand at a safe distance, watching but never playing. The elderly, the infirm, the wounded. All of them make an appearance.

Yesterday, I was sitting back on a chair watching the dogs play as the fog started to billow down over the cliff toward the park. A flock of birds flew high overhead. It was strangely quiet, despite the occasional bark or chuf.

Then I had a blinding insight that’s hard to describe. It became clear that none of the things I was seeing had anything to do with each other.

Not only were the dogs blissfully unaware of the unimportance of their tasks relative to their human owners, and blissfully unaware of the details of their surroundings, but the birds didn’t know about the dogs and the dogs didn’t know about the birds. The trees didn’t know about the dogs or the birds. The cliff didn’t know about the trees. The fog didn’t know about anything. These things existed completely discreetly and independently of one another, with no essential connection. Any connection I drew between them was arbitrary, and existed only in my consciousness — which was no more expansive, and no less limited, than the consciousness of the dogs.

I’ve long had this idea that the universe is all connected, and sometimes speaks to me in signs or portents. Everything happens for a reason. If only I could read the signs more effectively, I’d make the right decisions more often, I’d know what was going to happen before it happened, I’d understand my relationships and how to thrive at home, with friends, at work, in life. Sometimes, it seems as if I am able to read these signs ahead of time and make smart decisions, which I congratulate myself on. Other times, I see in retrospect how I missed something that should have been obvious, and kick myself.

But in the dog park, I realized this is all wrong. This way of looking at things — which may come more naturally to the religious, those who view the world as the manifestation of God’s will — assumes that what happens inside one’s mind is connected to what happens outside one’s mind. It assumes that our own consciousness is a part of something larger that we can occasionally glimpse through art, through science, through study, through a series of coincidences that we impose patterns on. (Mark Vonnegut termed this “grace” in “The Eden Express,” a fantastic book about a mental breakdown.)

But there’s no reason to believe that anything in our mind has anything to do with anything outside of it. The universe is infinitely larger than we can perceive, and what we see every day is just a play inside our heads, based on our own very limited human psychology — just like what the dogs are doing is disconnected from everything around them. The dogs receive occasional commands and nudges from we humans, the “higher” power in their universe, just like we may receive occasional nudges from some web of consciousness that’s one step up the chain. But these nudges and insights are an inessential, minuscule part of a whole that is so great, so complex, so disconnected, that it’s essentially unknowable.

I used to get this feeling sometimes looking at the stars. I imagine astronomers and microbiologists — people who are regularly confronted with the near-infinite scope and complexity of the universe — feel it often. But I had somehow forgotten that feeling, and became caught up in my ego and the presumed importance of my life, my circumstances, my mental chatter.

There is something liberating about the idea that the mind is finite and the universe is infinite, but I have no idea what to do with this knowledge, so instead I just did what I do and made a blog post in case it helps somebody else get to a helpful place.