Part 1: Our Border Collie, Gyp, takes out her herding frustration with us by bringing us sticks to throw, and her impulsiveness led me to look up the definition and explanation of OCD in the dictionary. What a surprise to find her picture in the heading, poster child of the affliction! Watching her in action is a study of wonder. I throw the stick, and as she’s getting quite a bit older, fifty percent of the time she misses seeing where it lands—and this is where it gets interesting. Putting her nose to the ground, she follows a hidden scent trail cast off by the stick as it passes over the earth, and/or is able to track the stick in a maze of perambulations, closer and closer in a fine scent trail of discovery. There are times, though, that she misses her prize and in a stretch of my imagination, she thinks, “Heck, I’ll just find another stick and bring it to him. A stick is a stick as long as we can continue this endless mind-numbing game.” Believe me when I say this, 99 percent of the time I have to be the one to stop this neurosis or it could go on for hours. One time we were invited to a friend’s house for a party that lasted long into the night, and our deranged dog wore through dozens of rounds of stick- and ball-throwers through the entirety of the event. If only Border Collies could be project managers, things would get done, yes?!

This was taken from the website Dogster: Psychologist and prolific dog book author Stanley Coren gave an example of what that huge sniffer sensitivity looks like. Let’s say you have a gram of a component of human sweat known as butyric acid. Surprisingly, humans are quite good at smelling this. If you let it evaporate in the space of a 10-story building, many of us would still be able to detect a faint scent upon entering the building. Not bad, for a human nose. But consider this: If you put the 135-square-mile city of Philadelphia under a 300-foot-high enclosure, evaporated the gram of butyric acid and let a dog in, the average dog would still be able to detect the odor.

Now getting back to that alternative stick. If I throw it, Gyp will often then track to the first stick and I can see her pause in recognition but then move on as she recognized the scent pattern fade as an earlier throw. She then moves on to find the first and either bring it or—just to add some complication—go back to the first stick and pick it up as well, to drop at my feet. At one point I started to teach her in stages: after she brought me one stick, I would say, “ONE.” If she dropped two sticks, “TWO,” and so on, to imprint numbers with sticks. This didn’t go well with me, as I lacked patience and follow through, thinking that she was only hearing: “La-la-la-stick,” or “Not close enough,” meaning, when she could hear, that the stick was just too darn far away. She would oblige me in her Border Collie stubbornness by picking up the stick and moving it a half-inch closer. To this day, our stubborn dog will not give us any quarter, always trying to get the jump on us.

As we have all seen, dogs communicate by sniffing each other’s butts and nether parts. Be a dog for a moment if you can, and imagine: what they are sensing?! Gender, food eaten, frequency of walks, environment of origin, pee scent to counter with their own and possibly recognize in future walks. They can sense fear, anxiety, and aggressiveness to avoid or attack, including hormone changes that define the encountered dog’s wellbeing or lack of, as well as their treatment; and what else?

We often have to put up with a lot in our dogs but imagine what they must tolerate in us? How can they endure the onslaught of scents we subject them to, so far above our range of recognition?

Part 2: If you’re the person who rolls your eyes when you read some of my philosophical ramblings, you can skip this next deeply insightful, and potentially life-changing section.

When I was teaching at City College of San Francisco, I would often tell my students that they were not as helpless as they imagined, that in fact they had much more control of their lives than they thought. Actually, most often they were creating results absentmindedly that ran counter to their intentions, kind of like getting on a horse and letting it go wherever it wanted, rather than taking the reins and being in control.

Let’s say, hypothetically, you need a pair of shoes, a car, or whatever is in your mind’s eye. You research your needs, check pricing, determine availability, etc. Then you find yourself noticing people wearing shoes, probably your desired choice, or for some reason that car that was looking pretty fine is now on the street wherever you look. Why is this? Ruth and I will discuss a subject at length, or research a theme and it just keeps popping up in the strangest places in seemingly unrelated situations. Is there a hand in the sky or invisible aliens playing cosmic games with our desires and sensibilities, or can it be something closer to our noses and we are the unconscious magicians playing with forces we know not what?

When I would teach electrical theory I would often take students of a trip through the universe via the great film created by the team Charles and Ray Eames in 1977 titled, Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. This nine-minute short takes place in the park on the lakefront in Chicago and we see from one meter away a couple sleeping in the sun. The landscape steadily moves out in powers of ten in larger increments until it reaches the farthest know region of space that is currently known. Then at a rate of 10 to the 10^th meters per second, the footage returns back to the same view in the park from one meter away and reverses into the skin of the man in negative powers of ten through the blood vessels, DNA, into the vast inner space of a single carbon atom again to the limits of our understanding of matter at this level.

As it turns out, in the microcosm, the laws of physics don’t follow the same rules that apply in the larger universe. Quantum physicists surmise through scientific analysis, that the observer can alter the observed and that matter is both present and not present in a “magical” quantum state or matrix. With this awareness of the universe as an infinite matrix we can see a bit more clearly that all matter is either bonding or disassociating in a constant state of flux. What seems solid is not. At an atomic level, the distance between the electrons and nucleus in a typical hydrogen atom, one of the most common elements in the universe, is metaphorically described thus: If we build a scale model of an atom with the nucleus one foot in diameter, the electron would be the equivalent of a little more than ten miles away! Now, do you believe your senses if there is no such thing as “solid?” Don’t even go there with me and ask, “What is real?”

My point is that we are part of a limitless micro/macrocosmic matrix and we do have something to do with its operation on some level. There are scientists that postulate that we live in multiverses coexisting simultaneously in space, time, matter, and energy, and the laws that govern them may be very different from our existence in this time and space. If we can set reciprocal actions and creations in motion by mere thoughts, what is possible? Am I naïve to postulate that we can “make the road by walking it?” Are we helpless players in this world on a stage of hopelessness? I think not.