A moment at a Target store reminded me of ancient wisdom

It is strange how wisdom shows itself at the oddest times. Last week, I stood in line at a Target store in a suburb of Minneapolis. I overheard the customer service person, a woman in her fifties, talking to a customer about putting a dog to sleep ten years ago. She had to take off her glasses and wipe tears away.

I wanted to tell her that I understood her pain, that I have cried over dogs remembered, and dogs lost. I wanted to say to her that it was wise and normal to grieve over the death of a dog. I wanted to remind her that grief is personal and there is no one way to grieve, nor is there a time limit. I wanted to tell her that a culture that doesn't understand how losing a dog can evoke such strong feelings is not a culture I want to live in.

A child who wants to bury a deceased goldfish and have a funeral, a teenager who wants to stay home from school to grieve a cat that suddenly died, a boy who is shocked by a dead deer on the road, a fifty-year-old woman who mourns a dog passed ten years ago; these are healthy responses where wisdom glimmers. They show we understand that all life is precious and that death is shocking yet inevitable.

The weight of all this is the price we pay to understand what is essential and what is not.

Anne Dillard wrote, "We have never had a God as compassionate as a man who stops and flicks over a beetle."

I want to live in a culture that teaches the important stuff: a culture in which we teach children to flick over beetles, a culture that reveres the natural world rather than plows it under, and where our natural response is to comfort someone who has lost a dog, rather than stare at them uncomprehendingly.

It would take us to slow down a little bit and pay attention. In doing so, the world, our blue planet, will unfold its story to us, and if we read it closely, it will change us profoundly. It will also remind us that we are part of the story, not the authors.

I hold that we know this. Plato mused that learning was a process of remembering or recollecting. I think that as a culture and as individuals, we deeply remember our place in the natural world. It's been covered up by a lust for modernity, industry, comfort, and material wealth. These are all good things; I would never protest against progress. We need a bit of perspective, of remembering and recollecting our species' evolutionary history. We don't stand outside the world; we are part of it and forget that at our peril.

Sometimes, in the hustle of modern life in the first world, it takes the trauma of the death of a loved one or a dog to remind us of this.

Standing in line at Target, thinking about my daily list of priorities and things to do, a woman weeping over the death of a dog caught me unaware. She brought me back to the sacred knowledge: life is precious, temporary, and ultimately fragile. All we have with our loved ones and dogs is this moment. Nothing in the natural world that we live in is guaranteed.

Holding that knowledge can drive us to nihilism or wonder and joy. It's our choice.

Although I can be cranky and often short-sighted, I choose to be in awe of this gift of living in the natural world. My wish is to celebrate that every day.

Hersch’s latest book, “Dog Lessons: Learning the Important Stuff from our Best Friends” is available at Barnes and Noble, bookstores everywhere and online. (and at Collected Works in Santa Fe!)