Walking the Dogs

I walked my friend Sierra's dogs with her a couple of days ago. Anything they did made me comment or ask a question.

"Do they poo once or twice?"
"Wow, they just sniff everything."
"Do they need to stay on their leashes?"

Clearly, I haven't had pets for years.

But as we walked and talked, I realized we ended up mostly talking. I noticed something beautiful about the dogs. They stopped to sniff absolutely everything. They'd get excited about a scent over here and then they'd scamper off over there. They'd wag their little stumps of tails and pant. They weren't too concerned about where we were going or if we were going in circles.

They simply enjoyed the journey.

And the simplicity in this reality was quite beautiful.So often, I'm caught up in where I'm going and what my destination is that it's easy to forget that the journey itself is a beautiful process. Sometimes, the journey itself can be more meaningful than the destination. We can become preoccupied with the ending that we forget the process, yet in the end processes are the ones that changed us, not destinations.

As I embark on my own journey to Morocco just four days from now, I want to cling to this image.
I want to remember the dogs sniffing the grass. I want to remember their little tails wagging with different scents they noticed. I want to remember how they eagerly pulled me from one tree to the next and how they weren't terribly concerned about getting to a certain place. They wanted to enjoy every step of the way.

While in Morocco, I will be keeping up a separate, more academic blog as well. You can find the link here. One of the scholarships I applied for requires I keep a blog, but I didn't want to link it to my personal blog, so I created a new one. Some posts will be repeats of these ones, but others will be different. I'd love comments or thoughts to any posts :)