Mar 22 - the Zen of Doggo

 Doing better each day that passes. My enthusiasm for work however remains zero. Whatever animal is inside of me controlling that has clearly just had enough and packed up. I am waiting to warm up and some sliver of enthusiasm to return. But at the moment. Zero.

Hospital phoned me back today.

They have no record of a follow up check up being required.

This despite me being told there would be one. And perhaps most damning of all, the GP reading out the surgery notes that said a follow up would be scheduled for 60 days time. Clearly, somewhere in there, the executive decision was made to delete that retrospectively. Unfortunately the notes still remain as evidence it was there.

This being the case, I have been told to go back through the system and get another referral.

Last time that took 2 years.

So what do we have here.

NHS denial that something was ever the case - despite their own records saying it was.

Advised to basically wait 2 years again.

*scratches head*

I find that my general opinion of the NHS has not altered given this experience. And. Again. I want my tax money back that I spent on the NHS. Because. I am not seeing shit for it. £3.7k annually. To get told to get fucked.

Seems like a poor deal ?

So today I have had to smooth that headfuck wrinkle into my life. Be calm. Don't let it get to you. Don't let their dysfunctional bullshit bring you down. Let it go. Chill. This however is not trivial. It does affect me. Of course.

But then this is also what I expect. That not only will you get fuck all from the NHS, you will also be made worse because you will then have to deal with the fall out of having to deal with their dysfunction. Disappointment. Anger. Frustration. Fatalism. Sadness. That they don't care. Isolation. State of the modern world. And yada. And once again, they fall without noticing into actively harming rather than helping. First, do no harm so sayeth the hippocratic oath.

Ho hum.

Athena has trotted into cheer me up. Coincidentally or because her emotive radar has gone off and decided I needed distracting.

The old lady paws at me. Look at me. Give me fuss. And a bit of a wrassle. She's happy. Old. Still going. Still wants to play, but, a bit old for it. She gives me a sniff once over. Always curious. Sticks her nose in my groin unabashedly. What do you smell like. Uh huh. Yes. That's me. Satisifed she returns to a gentle wrassle.

Life continually shows me stuff. Repeated lessons. Some things are shit. Few things are good. Dogs seem to have some wonderful balance of happy, carefree and no false front. In all the things I see and experience they are a wonder to me. Of all the living things, they are amazingly unique in their balance. And their capability to radiate positivity. It's no accident they are therapy animals. And from kids to alzheimer oldsters they lift everything. There is I am sure a secret in there somewhere. A secret to life and humanity and happiness. Something that dogs are innately aware of, having been formed through countless generations of evolution to be our best companions. Something that we ourselves, for all our abstract smarts, have yet to figure out.

Evolution always wins. Given time. And variation. It is the settling of water to its natural resting point. Inevitable. Irresistable. Simple. And the truth in the fact that somethings are easier to do than think. Pouring water into a cup is easy. Writing that down in math, thinking it through is, for us, impossible to do perfectly. With huge effort we can make an approximation. The math of hydrodynamics. And yet a 4 year old can pour water into a cup.

That lesson repeats over and over. Somethings are not feasible to be conquered with your brain. You cannot out think the universe. You can only perceive the top level of complexity as an illusory simplicity. The pouring of water. So simple. Yet underneath governed by hideous complexity of atoms, and electrons and entanglement and gravity and the very fabric of the universe.

You can never ( probably ) truly understand the objective whole. But you can easily perceive the subjective simplicity.

Back to dogs.

Dogs have no theories. No formula. No deep thinking plan on how to make people happy. Positive. Feel cared for. Attached. They simply do. Because. That's what they do. Like a child pouring water into a cup. It's easy. No thought.

But us. We struggle to get to that kind of zen for ourselves. We think. And formulate. And plan. Have therapy. And philosophy. And try patterns of behaviour. Regimes. All some frantic attempt to write down the formula to be happy, care free, positive. 10 things to eliminate anxiety. 5 things to cure burn out. And we can't do it. The complexity of the solution required escapes us. At best, we learn to approximate it. Via some voodoo of stitched together mechanisms - 3 articles from Marie Claire, a visit to a therapist once a month, and a bottle of wine every night. ( for instance ).

So dogs do effortlessly what we cannot.

A bird flies. A fish swims. Each to their nature. That evolution has lead them to.

There is also a key lesson here, the core concept of Taoism that says, rather mystically, that the unknowable cannot be known. There is the known. And the unknown. And that part of the universe is forever unknowable. And if you end up knowing it. It was not unknowable. Circular logic. But there is a thing in there. That reaches down through quantum physics ( so often the case at that level, things start joining up, philosophically to scientifically ), that there is shit that you will never get to know. And the important bit. You need to accept that. There is also the concept that yes, some things are circular. A bird can fly and a fish can swim, precisely because they can fly and swim. If they couldn't, they wouldn't be those things. This is something that an evolutionary mechanism is best at. Fitting. Finding the shape of the hole. And fitting in it. So subtly and slowly, that it seemed like it was always designed that way.

Uh huh.

The philosophy and science of the Taoist zen doggo.

We are what we are. Try not to fight it so much. Accept it more. Learn as best you can - which is to say crappily - from doggo. Perhaps then. Just be happy there is doggo. An evolutionarily designed love bug.