It Was Grass, Not That Long Ago

Some years back we went to a sheep-herding demo, the classic border collie vs sheep contest. No contest. For the sheep, it’s just one indignity after another, for the dogs, it’s sport. And it’s beautiful, the orchestration, the shouts, the whistles, the turning of the flock first this way, then that, then funneling them into the pen, three last strays rounded up, looking baffled, and relieved that the unequal contest is finished.

Once the show was over, the dogs lay under some trees, incredibly long tongues lolling, then from time to time got up and snacked on… well…, what the sheep had left behind.

We were close to the old farmer whose dogs these were, so I made some kind of smart remark. He looked at me with the gentle patience that country folk can show toward smart city lawyers, and said, “Well, it was grass not that long ago.”

Of course he was right. City folk in their sensitivity will go, “Eeewwww! That dog is eating poo!!!” But the dogs, and the farmer, kept it all in perspective.

Perspective is a funny thing, isn’t it? The ability to take a step or two back and see things as they really are.

The client who “loses it” over a surcharge of forty-nine dollars. The spouse who goes nuts because you forgot to pick up milk (and to be fair, they did tell you twelve times, the stores are closed, and the kids would like to have breakfast in the morning).

You get home from the office at nine-thirty, thoroughly exhausted, and your spouse hands you a seven year old and says, grimly, “YOU try putting him to bed!!!” The last thing you need, and much of the world would understand if you “lost it”.

But in fact, the world has not ended, your spouse’s day has been worse than yours, and before you lies an opportunity to change the way your seven year old and you see each other forever. Ninety minutes later, as you lie beside Ewan, who is gently breathing, you realize that you love this child more than anything else on the planet. Perspective. And ninety minutes out of the roughly forty million you’ll exist.

Every day we’re handed unreasonable, crazy situations, stuff that makes no sense. But remember the old farmer, “It was grass, not that long ago.”

Perspective.