She never asked me to earn it. The warmth of her, the absolute certainty of her presence — it asked nothing of me but to be there.
Worth is a strange thing to learn from a dog. And yet here I am.
I grew up believing that worth was something you accumulated. Good grades, good behaviour, good enough. A ledger you kept, hoping the credits would eventually outweigh the debits. I was very good at the ledger. I was very bad at believing it balanced.
“She doesn’t know about the apologies I owe or the ones I’ve been waiting for.”
Daisy has no concept of a ledger. She doesn’t know what I’ve done or left undone. She doesn’t know about the apologies I owe or the ones I’ve been waiting for. She knows that I am warm and I smell familiar and I sometimes have cheese in my pocket. That is, apparently, enough.
There is a Buddhist concept — I’ve been reading a lot of Buddhism since Daisy arrived, which feels appropriate — of inherent worth. The idea that you don’t earn your right to exist. That it simply is. I have read about this concept many times. I have never felt it until I watched a dog sleep with her head on my knee, completely unbothered by my entire complicated history.
I don’t think Daisy is enlightened. I think she is a dog. But I think dogs might be accidentally teaching us something that centuries of philosophy have been trying to say on purpose.