Food. Family. Affection. Trust.
That is the complete list of what my dog requires, and she is — as far as I can observe, and I have observed closely, at length, at an hour I should have been asleep — completely full.
Not resigned. Not making the best of a limited situation. Full.
she doesnt ask where i went. she just puts her head on my foot. like a period. like shes ending the sentence of my day.
the thing that gets me
When I come home, she behaves as though my return is the single largest event to have occurred anywhere since the last time it happened.
The same reaction. Every time. Undiminished by repetition, uncorrected by the overwhelming statistical evidence that I come back basically always.
I have thought about this more than is normal.
Because I do the opposite, constantly, at scale. I get the thing I spent a year wanting and I feel roughly nine minutes of it and then I am scanning for the next one. My capacity to be delighted by a recurring good thing degrades on contact.
Question
Is she content because her list is short, or is her list short because she is content?
What I learned later
I don't think it's either. I think she has no mechanism for comparison, and comparison is where almost all of my dissatisfaction is manufactured.
what I am not saying
I am not saying be a dog. That's the cheap version and it isn't available to us anyway — I have a frontal lobe and plans and a company to build, and I do not actually want to give those up.
And ambition is not the enemy here. I like wanting things. Some of the best things about my life came directly out of wanting them badly.
The question isn't want less. The question is the one from chapter three that I still cannot answer:
How much is enough?
more. more. more. am i full? not completely. but fuller than i have ever been.
She puts her head on my foot and ends the sentence of my day, and she has no idea she is the most persuasive philosophical argument in the house.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.