Life in a bubble is easy

            Stress in an unknowable entity.  You can’t see it, can’t touch it, can’t taste it, hear it, or smell it.  But wow, can you FEEL it.  You can feel it in your back and in your shoulders.  Or in your heart or your lungs.  And of course, the strongest place you can feel stress is in yet another unknowable entity: your mind.  I find it amazing to think about what stress can do to a person.  This indistinguishable thing can cause physical ailments like heart attacks, strokes, ulcers, random pains, a cold.  And then there’s the effect on the mind: panic attacks (which I’ve been told feel much like heart attacks), irrational behavior, depression, loss of appetite.  The list could be endless.

            Stress is universal.  Everyone feels it in some way, but the ways in which we deal with it differ drastically.  Some people need to talk it out, some exercise, some drink.  Some people have hobbies that are relaxing, and some get massages.  Then there’s a large part of the population that just don’t deal with it.  They let it fester until it grows into something so much bigger than it ever should have been.

            I’ve never been someone who lets myself get overly stressed about things.  I’m pretty good at letting the bad things that happen in my life roll off my shoulders.  I grew up in a large family, and in order to survive 3 opinionated siblings, there are times when you just have to let it go.  But not all stresses can roll off your shoulders.  The paper you have to write in college isn’t going to go away if you just forget about it.  Money is a constant stress that doesn’t disappear.  Learning about my student’s not-so-perfect home lives isn’t something I can easily “let go” of.  So for those times in my life, I’ve always had some pretty good ways of dealing with stress.  Reading and writing has always been helpful.  Swimming was a big part of my life up through high school.  I can be pretty introverted when I want to and often just being alone helps.  When I discovered running, I couldn’t believe what an amazing de-stressor it was.  When you’re running, it’s so easy to think about everything and nothing all at the same time.  Whether I’m with friends, or by myself with my iPod, stress just disappears while I’m running.

            But as we know, in the beginning there was no running for me.  So before there was running, there was the dog park.  The tiny dog park that sits at the foot of McCarren Park in Brooklyn is a bubble.  Inside the wrought iron fences, there are two entire social networks.  There are the dogs of course, and then there are the dog owners.  When you are in the dog park, nothing outside exists.  You get to watch dogs play (and what could be more relaxing than watching dogs play?) and talk about dogs with other dog-owners who are just as obsessed as you.  In the bubble of the dog park, real life disappears.

When I first realized how energetic Lucy was, I took her straight to the dog park.  She was a hit there.  She was so floppy and uncoordinated that she’d constantly trip over herself.  She was a roly-poly mass of flesh with a hound’s howl and ears so long that she couldn’t drink out of the water bowl without getting the tips of them wet.  Other dog owners loved her and looked longingly at her, wishing their dogs could still have that cute puppiness in them.  Every time a new puppy came in, you could just see everyone melt.  Lucy grew up there, and through Lucy and Lucy’s new-found friends, I made my own friends.  Suddenly I found that my life was centered around the dog park.

Here is what life looked like then:  Wake up.  Get to work at least an hour early.  Plan the day.  Feel lungs start to constrict as the morning bell approaches.  Welcome my first graders.  Drown for the first half of the day in a mess of learning how to teach and learning how to control kids who were used to simply being ignored or yelled at (or worse) at home.  Eat lunch with other drowning teachers and commiserate.  Spend the second half of the day floundering to stay afloat while counting down minutes until the afternoon bell.  Send the kids back into the projects across the street.  Try to breathe.  Take the subway home while trying to breathe.  Get Lucy and walk 15 minutes to the dog park.  Breathing gets easier.  Enter the dog park.  Breathe.  Big deep breath.  Breathe.  Spend anywhere from 60-90 minutes wasting time watching dogs play and talking to dog owners about unimportant things.  Revel in how easy it is to breathe.  Walk home.  Eat dinner.  Sleep (kind of).  Repeat. *NOTE: on weekends, replace “sleep” with “drink” and replace entire work day with “sleep.”

And so life went for a full year.  I survived that first year of teaching.  I made it through puppy training.  I integrated the social circle of the dog park into other aspects of life.  I moved in with a new roommate that I met at the dog park.  I was happy.  Or at least as happy as I’d been in a while.  Life was good enough.  Then, as always seems to happen after I become comfortable and content with my place in life, things abruptly changed.  Lucy developed an alternate personality with a few select dogs she didn’t like so much.  I have named this personality Lucifer.  Just when I thought I had it all figured out—the dog park as my life raft buoying me up above all the stresses forcing me down, Lucifer pulled it out from underneath me.  And for a moment in time, I began to sink again.