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Category: Bounds>Culture>impacted by Nature

  • Gabby Gifts #1

    Sometimes Gabby has cultivated a softer heart within me when that goal has seemed more difficult to obtain with human interaction.

    Usually, when someone is unable to feel shame or guilt or a pricked conscience, it can be an indicator of unhealthy degrees of narcissism.

    Like most words that are used to label aspects of the human condition, this one’s usage is subject to various conflicting agendas. Lacking the academic vetting granted to specialists, I can only offer my personal use of this word here:

    Characterized by a focus so intensely on one’s own satisfaction or identity or bias or safety or control or objective…

    …that others are granted value only to the degree that they serve one’s own driving impulse. The narcissist label almost always includes the implication that the narcissist is unable to exercise any moral sense other than:

    “Goodness, fairness, justice: nothing more or less than me getting what is required for my satisfaction.”

    A little extra nuance: The narcissist is unable honestly to care about another person. Instead, s/he can only pretend to do so for the sake of a self-centered objective.

    Think: “Conscienceless-ness.”

    All human nature contains narcissism. The label is reserved for those with an excess of it as defined within a given context. Personally, I sometimes wonder if the increased term’s use reflects an inability to ignore what, in a less triggered era was called “sin”.

    Of course, there are still some that seem routinely to unite integrity, kindness, and a peaceful conscience in their own deepest self. They are a glorious rarity, and I admit to weaknesses in my ability to notice them. It’s a matter worth taking up more energetically than I have heretofore. In any case…

    Gabby lacks any hint of narcissism. She exhibits the best of both worlds: Her animal (wolfish? narcissistic?) instincts are certainly present, but they never seem to make her a blindly self-righteous, entitled user. Outside of those rare occasions when she needs to be firm toward another canine regarding a legitimate personal boundary, she remains truly loving, devoted, teachable, and soft hearted.

    I have finally arrived at my main point:

    There are times when she truly does go beyond a fair standard of behavior that has been well established in our home: grabbing someone’s food out of their hand, running into a traffic area when she is being called back from danger, laying for the hundredth time on my wife’s clean sheets after a few hours in the woods, and other common dog at home stuff.

    And displeasure gets expressed in such cases, sometimes — rarely, as when a frightened child is present — even with a swat to emphasize the point. With varying intensity, she demonstrates her awareness that there is a problem: a squeal, a bit of cowering, a look of bewilderment at a human concern about something so dog-natural, a brief escape into privacy, etc.

    But Gabby never demonstrates any shame or guilt or being dignity-compromised. What she does seem very aware of is the fact that there is a break in the bond she enjoys with her senior partner (me) 98% of the time. A link has been severed, a happy peace has been sullied, she has been reminded that there is still a serpent in her Garden of Eden. Rather than messing it all up with the manipulative game-playing, the self-defensive evasions and recriminations that accompany marred human nature, she faces head-on the challenge that matters most: the crack in a relationship.

    I think that truly Good think she seems to be exhibiting could be, for me, all the explanation I need for why God created a world and a humanity that could allow for great troubles. “A crack in the relationship.” An opporunity to take a relationship deeper than it could otherwise have been. The best possible occsasion for sorrow, humility, wonder, forgiveness, an awareness of legitimate boundaries, and then.. a deeper loyalty, with a little more joy added.

    No running into the jungle to cover up with leaves and hide from the giver of all goodness. No shame with excuses, easy dismissal of a revealing light, blame of someone else for causing the problem, minutes or hours or days or years of seething resentment beneath the surface of conventional awareness. No. Just a crack in the relationship, now healing or healed and making the next affectionate hug all the more wonderful.

    I’m being silly though, right? Giving all this credit to a mere pet dog. Do you think it would be more appropriate for me to take credit? No. I didn’t think so.

    Blessings. And work at being vulnerable when the blessings come. Invulnerability is a cancer much worse than cancer.