Annie

I've decided that since I can pretty much guarantee that this dog will be a feature in many of my future blog posts, she deserves her own introductory post.

So world, meet Annie!

This dog took my life and changed everything about it - and made a million parts of it even better than I ever could have imagined.

Annie is a rescue hound. For the first five years of her life, she was kenneled, mistreated, under socialized (with humans), and bred as often as she could be. She is one of the lucky ones - breaking that cycle of mistreatment that so many hounds are subjected to. The first day she was brought into a foster home was the first time she had been treated kindly. She was a girl with her tail tucked between her legs, not knowing what to expect of humans - yet resilient, in that she was willing to learn and try. To give people a chance to prove that there are kind people out there. It was slow work. But for every success, every time a human was gentle and kind, she was so grateful and was happy to try and make that act of kindness happen again.

She has come a long way from those first few days with her foster mom, and her first few weeks with me and the firefighter (read: significant other).

I have never laughed so hard, so often - loved so much and so openly - and been so humbled by the trust of another.

Annie is a special dog. She's got personality, energy, silliness, and a whole lot of love. So I'm sure there will be many a post to come about the things she teaches me (and quite a few funny stories accompanying those lessons along the way).

So know her, love her and watch us grow. It's been a fun adventure so far (see: her first bath below).

(Screw you, mom. If I have to get tied up and wet, so do you.)

Balance

Recently, I was discussing with some friends (both early on in their careers and those who already mid-career and highly successful individuals) how when creating our daily to-do lists we add tasks that we've either already completed or are incredibly simple to check off as a way of motivating ourselves to tackle the harder and more complicated tasks that are also on the list. It's a mind game we play with ourselves to try and overcome the exhaustion and overwhelming feeling that we are taking on more and trying to do more than is reasonable in a given day.

It was several hours after that particular conversation, one in which we lightheartedly joked around and shared our favorite "layup tasks" (Read: finish your third cup of coffee - CHECK!), that I realized just how disturbing our conversation actually was.

The issue at the core of our banter was balance. Balance in work lives, family lives, volunteer lives, and our relationships with our significant others. We were a relatively high-functioning group of people, and yet we had resorted to creating non-sense or rote tasks out of our daily routines just to try and  BALANCE out the far more challenging things that we actually needed to devote our smarts, talents and efforts towards. Which allowed me to draw the conclusion that balance, in the crazy, modern, fast-paced world we live in, is something that is elusive to many. For a long time, I would have included myself in the count of those who balance eludes. But a couple of things have changed.

For one, I learned to say no. Which is harder than you may think. There were so many things I was being asked to do that, in reality, anyone could have done. I used to take what should have been shared responsibility and personalized it as my own. And so I learned to say no. I would ask myself - "Is there someone else who is equally capable and willing?" and if the answer was "yes", I would pass that task to them. To hold others accountable for their share. And once I figured that out, I was amazed by the amount of time and energy and mental acuity that I had to devote to projects and ideas and people that were uniquely mine. 

Secondly, I got a dog. True enough, a dog probably isn't the solution to everyone's problems with balance. But let me tell you what a dog did do for me: it forced me to stop and take a break and rejuvenate my mind

 - think about something else or think about something from a different perspective; it forced me to get outside and take inspiration from the world around me; it forced me to meet new people and learn about new things. It forced me to prioritize my personal life and my own well-being.

Finally, I tried to infuse love into everything I do. If I cannot love something deeply and truly and meaningfully, then it is something that actively works against my well-being - in both my work life and personal life. In the end, it was a choice to prioritize myself; a choice to prioritize myself in a way that augments my personal, work, volunteer and relationship goals.

So do I still sometimes add that third cup of coffee to my to-do list? Absolutely, but this time when I add it, it's so I can sit outside in the yard and enjoy my coffee and reflect while Annie (my dog) toodles around and plays, and I come back to the next task better than I was before.

And that, right there, is the art of balance.