The Journey

I was poking around on YouTube and stumbled across this video again, and I thought I should share it.

This video makes me cry every time I watch it. Sort of ridiculously so, but I am a big baby who sometimes cries just watching commercials on TV, so it’s okay.
Funny enough, about an hour ago I was cleaning up the house because family was due to come over. I moved Auggie’s ribbon displays into my bedroom while I cleaned the office (right now they are all framed but just sitting on the floor) and then wasn’t sure if I should move them back into the office. In the office, they’re sitting out in plain sight, and I thought about how some of my family might make remarks about competing with my dog. I sort of didn’t want to deal with the snide comments about what kind of person I must be since we compete and get ribbons and toy prizes and Q’s and titles.
And I thought to myself, I could just tell them, “It doesn’t really matter. Even if we had no ribbons, he would still be Auggie. And at the end of his life I will not think ‘If only we had gotten a few more ribbons!'” I’m sure they would smirk and snidely say “oh of COURSE.” And I could just smile knowingly, because they will never realize the real reward of competing with my dog is not the ribbons we come away with… it’s just that feeling of working with him.

We returned to agility practice this week, doing some indoor work on Tuesday. I do need to get him conditioned to get back into it, since our first trial is March 17th, but I mostly just took the opportunity to play with my dog. And we played and played and played. I did work on a few things, like calling him into or pushing him into a tunnel opening that was “wrong” – that is, not directly facing him – but mostly, the idea was to just have some fun. And boy was it fun. Even more fun was how FAST Auggie was, and how much delight I felt because of how much fun HE was having. It’s not fun at all when he’s not having fun, after all.
I loved it. And I love the game. Not because of the ribbons… but because we get to play the game together.