Do You Need Help Carrying Your Baggage?
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| Max Hirsch, jumping and exclaiming "Oh, what a day!" |
Cesar Millan says that dogs live in the moment. That they live each day as a new day and don’t look back. That they don’t hang on to emotional trauma like humans do. That they don’t need help carrying their bags, because they don’t have “baggage”.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could learn this skill from our dogs? Would you call it a skill? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a decision. Simply a decision to free ourselves from the pain and worry and sadness that accumulates in our lives.
And that’s what it does. It accumulates. We hold on to things so much longer than we need to, sometimes for years, and sometimes for our whole lives. Many times things plague us, and we carry that baggage with us forever.
Why does this happen? Because we let it. It’s the same answer to the question of why your dog misbehaves. Because you let him. If you want him to stop a particular bad behavior, you have to simply stop letting it happen. We can stop the madness in our lives if we simply stop letting it happen. If we stop letting it become baggage. If we just let it go. Because we don’t have to live in our past. It’s a choice. It’s what you do when going forward that matters.
What would happen if we made the decision to live in the moment like dogs do? Think of how free we would be if we could forget about all the bad things that have happened to us and look ahead to the future, always smiling, and always ready to play! Think of how much less stress would be in our lives if we didn’t worry about what happened in the past or worry about what might happen in the future. Think of how different our state of mind would be when we woke up in the morning. How would you feel if everyday you awakened with excitement and joy, jumping and exclaiming “Oh, what a day!”
Dogs don’t have to make that decision. It’s just part of who they are. They are programmed to live in the moment. We can program ourselves to live in the moment. It takes 21 days to create a habit. If we make the decision to let things go, even little things, everyday, soon we will “program” ourselves to live in the moment.
As summer begins, it’s a great time to learn to live in the moment. Spend some time with your dog. Watch him. See how happy he is in each and every moment. Learn from him. Take your own moments, moments of joy, moments of peace, moments of laughter, and create memories. Let all the other stuff go. Then the next time someone asks you if you need help carrying your bags, you can say, “No, thank you. I only have one bag, and it’s full of memories of moments that I am happy to carry with me, and weighs nothing at all.”
Have a Dog Gone Great Day!
Kari
