The art of living

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday’s defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.Og Mandino

So we have men with halos. The demi-gods and holier than thou godmen telling us how to live the days that we have. They with their gospels teach us – the way to love, to live and to die. The art of living as some may call it. The dogs, however, have always known it. No sermon, no scripture. A dog wakes up already fluent in the one thing all those gospels are still chasing: today is the whole of it, so live it. Watch the stray who bites into the clouds above Nainital: broken glass in his paw, deodars overhead, and still more present than any of us with our camera filters and our someday plans. “Because of the dog’s joyfulness,” Mary Oliver scribbled in Dog Songs, “our own is increased. It is no small gift.” 

Here’s to the dogs!