Thirteen years ago, when Woody came to us from the animal shelter, he took the back yard as his own. A fenced half acre became his great wide open and he became a whirling dervish, racing the perimeter, weaving into shrubbery, under lawn chairs and jumping onto, off and them back on top of picnic tables. A glorious dog’s life, indeed.
If we believe what we hear about dog years, Woody is over 90 years old now and deals with a touch of arthritis in his hip. Today, Woody believes the back yard is best used for napping in the sunshine. Running around and all that nonsense is left for the younger pups who occasionally come to visit.
Since he no longer self-initiates excersise, I help Woody by taking him to a local park for walks. For 30 minutes or so each day Woody ambles about, checks his p-mails and eyeballs any other dogs in the park. It’s not an aerobic exercise but it keeps him moving and Woody enjoys the outing so much that, bad hip and all, he still jumps into the backseat of the car and waits for me to crank it up.
While Woody exercises his legs heart and territorial defense tactics, I amble with him and allow my mind to follow its nose. In short, I follow him and daydream. I firmly believe that daydreaming is an undervalued and underutilized vital part of creative and critical thinking. I have long been a daydreaming proponent even in (and especially in) the workplace. Akin to but on a slightly different track from transcendental meditation, you select a few quiet moments and allow your mind to amble among your thoughts without setting goals or boundaries. Your mind may pause and hover over a project you’ve been working on or drop in to revisit a recent conversation. Daydreaming is a great opportunity to look past the facts and potential obstacles and transcend to the “what if” zone. You’ll return to the facts and more cognitive thinking, of course but you may return a little enlightened and with a slightly different path for success.
During Woody’s and my ambles this past week, I thought, time and again, of my recent trip to Florence to assist with the Trees SC / Duke Energy Tree Giveaway. The project is described in detail in another of today’s articles, but my mind kept stopping and reliving happy exchanges with the tree recipients. People were demonstrably and enthusiastically happy to receive their new trees. They may have been unaware of all the reasons trees are valuable, but many knew that their new tree would provide energy savings, myriad other environmental benefits and beauty. I’ve been wondering if all our combined years of thumping the community forestry bible have paid off. People get it! That is a happy thought and part of the sweet daydream I’ve been having lately.
Advice offered by a Trees SC board member, as she gave trees to young people, is part of that daydream too. She advised them to take a photograph of themselves next to the tree after planting and take another picture in a few years after graduating from high school. The photos will, of course, indicate how much the child and the tree grew over the years and each one can serve as a benchmark for the other. Maybe, in time, a college student or young adult will daydream about her childhood home and realize that she and a tree lived together, grew together and, together, became part of a daydream.
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