Happiness is joint-proof

Did you feel a little happier today than yesterday? Me neither.

I'm not sure we're supposed to feel happier today than we did yesterday, so when somebody asked me that recently and I said no, and felt guilty about it, I had to stop and think for a minute about the validity of the question.

We've got a disease that keeps us in various stages of pain. We have up days when we can chase a stick and we have down days when we lie under the porch. It's not realistic to think we should look for improvement from day to day and then feel guilty when it doesn't come. That's a linear recovery process from the flu, not a strategy for dealing with arthritis.

We've got bad days and good days, and worse days and better days, and every morning when I get up and bark at the door, I'm not sure how quickly my legs are going to take me to the tree trunk. I reinvent myself each morning on the way to that tree. I've stopped grading my performance. It is what it is on any given day.

Sound lazy? Sound like I've given up the good fight? No, I'm not and I haven't. I'm just not measuring my days on some arbitrary simley-face scale to make others around me feel better - dog or human.

Do I exercise? You bet. There's this bitch I'm in love with and it's great exercise to stay up with her comings and goings, and sniffings and droppings. And there's this trail of smells through the woods that I love to walk. And it makes me feel better when I do.

Exercise is something that took me a long time to understand because I was measuring myself on somebody else's scale. There has to be a motivation for exercise. For me its sex and smells. I don't know what it is for other dogs, but I know that if there is no motivation, there is no exercise and dogs get fat and lazy, and the arthritis gets worse.

There's a lake nearby and each summer I swim across it. The feeling at the other side is unknowable unless you've done it. I will prepare for that swim, but not to be the fastest or the prettiest or the sleekest, but to be the happiest when I reach the other side. And when that happens, I'll say I had a good day, and all the days leading up to it will have been good too because without them I wouldn't have succeeded.