December 29, 2017 at 4:32 p.m.
Bark! And a Happy New Year!
Bark! And a Happy New Year!
In the Year of the Dog, the canine's noble characteristics are to be celebrated and emulated - an animal who puts the needs of her community above her own, who constantly searches for ways to protect and defend family and friends, a fellow creature who is generous and social and who hates cowardice and injustice.
Most of all, the Chinese zodiac tells us, the dog is the eternal optimist - she always thinks she's going to get the biscuit, even if she never has before - a dreamer who lives for his dreams to the very end, for the canine knows that to follow the dream is to live it.
What does this year of the dog, 2018, hold in store for us? We know not, but we do know in what direction a dog would tell us to go. The dog most assuredly would tell us to walk down the path of our own dreams, for the path of dreams, and only the path of dreams, leads to a better life and a better world.
In human history, some of our own species have offered like advice. Long ago Henry David Thoreau urged us to go confidently in the direction of our dreams and to live the life we imagine for ourselves, and Eleanor Roosevelt advised us that the future belongs to those of us who believe in the beauty of our dreams.
What Thoreau and Roosevelt knew - and, of course, any dog knows - is that dreamers are by nature optimists and dreams themselves are but the frame of an optimist's house. An optimist builds his dreams and then lives his life in them.
Like a dog, a dreamer always thinks the best is yet to come. She adds on to her sturdy home and later bequeaths it to the world for others to live in. Confident and optimistic, she neither surrenders to isolation and division nor falls to anguish and pessimism.
In 2018, that is the house we wish for all humankind to live in, the house that expresses the beauty of our dreams, of our commonality, of our optimism. As Karen Ravn wrote: "Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be."
Let us bark to that.
To be sure, such being is not easy, and it will not get any easier in 2018. We live in a polarized world, and naysayers abound. And yet, let us have little patience for the hand wringers, for no one ever said life would be effortless. In the face of pain, a dog will persevere.
"Life is not easy for any of us," Marie Curie wrote. '"But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained."
Our advice and our hope for the new year, then, is for each of us to feel free to dream all that we dare to dream, and to feel as free as a dog on the run to chase those dreams relentlessly, for, Bernard Edmond said, that is the beauty of the human mind, to dream and to chase the dream, and, we might add, that is the secret to a better, more peaceful world.
These days cries of pessimism and outrage fill the air. They warn of doom. They scream that we must not look ahead but only behind us for answers. They tell us to think small and expect only safety nets in life. From all quarters they try to stamp out eternal optimism and hope, and the dreams that flow from those traits.
They forsake loyalty and companionship for the fires of fear and threats of retribution. The shrill barkers of the modern media age turn their backs on the very traits so many choose to celebrate in man's best friend, in this, the year of the dog.
Do not listen to those yelps of defeat. As T.S. Eliot wrote, "For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice."
In the year of the dog, let us embrace the voice of optimism and hope, of eternal friendship and love and loyalty. Let us all join hands and march forward, a free people, toward our dreams.
For to follow our dreams is to live them, and it is the way to peace and prosperity.
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