In the authentic happiness Shadow finds in the most banal of activities, his commitment to life and action is one that we humans find so hard to emulate. This is because of something that happened to us: a great schism in consciousness that we know as reflection. We humans are the world heavyweight champions of thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it.
This schism breaks us in two. Henceforth we are all divided into one who thinks and one who is thought about; one who sees and one who is seen; one who reflects and one who is reflected upon. This bifurcation in our consciousness robs us of the possibility of a certain type of happiness, the happiness that accompanies being whole. Shadow is whole in a way that a human can never be. As a result, he is a creature of commitment while we are anxious, troubled creatures – creatures of doubt. For a dog such as Shadow, happiness comes effortlessly, but for us it is a hard-won, sometimes bitter, achievement.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/18/i-wag-therefore-i-am-the-philosophy-of-dogs
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