Something about a Dog

Dogs conceptualize the world differently. They see something fun and will charge at it full throttle. They see something scary and will run away. They see something unknown and will bark at it all night. Their existence is defined by perception followed by immediate action, with no space for endless contemplation in-between. Humans are different. Instead of running towards or away from scary or exciting things, we can spend a whole life time debating whether or not we will make an ass of ourselves in the process., and then on our death bed we regret all of the things we never ran towards or away from. But somewhere during our maturation, humans must forfeit the spontaneity of dogs for the acute self awareness of the Homo-sapien. If we all ran around like dogs all day, which some people do, nothing would ever get done. It begs the question, is a dog a slave because it acts on impulse, or does it attain freedom by being subservient to its own inner nature? And what about humans? We believe we attain freedom if we become masters of our own impulsivity, but don’t we then just become slaves to some fantasy about how a human should behave? I’m not sure, but I am happy to be a human and not a dog. For if I were a dog, I could never appreciate the concept of a dog as I am doing right now.