She never asked me to earn it. The warmth of her, the absolute certainty of her presence — none of it asked anything of me except that I 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. It was a sort of 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, doesn’t know about the apologies I owe or the ones I’ve spent years waiting for. What she knows is that I’m warm, and I smell familiar, and I sometimes have cheese in my pocket. That, apparently, is enough.
There is a Buddhist idea (I’ve been reading a lot of Buddhism since Daisy arrived, which feels appropriate) of inherent worth. It’s the idea that you don’t earn your right to exist; it simply is. I’ve read about it plenty of times. I never once felt it until I watched a dog fall asleep with her head on my knee, entirely unbothered by my whole complicated history.
I don’t think Daisy is enlightened. But I’ve started to suspect that she might be teaching me, by accident, the thing centuries of philosophy have been trying so hard to say on purpose.