Human life is a constant navigation of what comes next. We are architects of anticipation, spending our days constructing elaborate scaffolds of “what if” and “when.” We fret over Monday’s meetings on a Sunday evening, we stress about retirement while still in our twenties, and we mourn missed opportunities that haven’t even arrived yet. We live in the future, a phantom timeline that is always just out of reach.
Sauli, my Belgian Malinois, lives in a completely different world. She does not know what a calendar is. She has no concept of “next week,” no dread of the upcoming month, and no anxiety about the changing of the seasons. To Sauli, there is only now. This is not a lack of intelligence; it is a profound, instinctual wisdom that we humans have traded away in exchange for our complex, predictive brains.
I often watch her in the moments between our activities. If we are sitting on the rug, she is entirely consumed by the texture of the carpet under her paws, the dust motes dancing in the afternoon light, or the subtle sound of a bird landing in the tree outside. She is not thinking about the walk we took three hours ago, nor is she plotting the dinner she will receive in another three. She is fully, vibrantly present. In that state, there is no room for worry, because worry requires a future that does not exist for her.
The root of this canine superpower is trust. Sauli never worries about tomorrow because she has deep, unshakeable faith in the present. She knows that as long as I am there, her bowl will be filled, her walks will happen, and her head will find a safe place to rest. When we are walking through the park, she doesn’t check her watch to ensure we get home by a certain time; she trusts that I am the guardian of the schedule. She is free to be a dog because I have assumed the burden of the clock.
Humans, conversely, often suffer because we feel we must be the guardians of our own entire lives. We feel that if we aren’t worrying about tomorrow, we aren’t prepared for it. But Sauli shows me that there is a difference between preparation and anxiety. You can prepare for the future—you can buy the dog food, you can pay the mortgage, you can study for the exam—without living in the misery of it. Sauli prepares for her life simply by being healthy, alert, and engaged. She is always ready for the next moment because she is fully participating in this one.
When we are on a hike, she doesn’t worry about whether the trail will end. She just loves the mud between her toes, the rustle of the leaves, and the thrill of the chase. If she encounters a rock, she climbs it. If she finds a stream, she drinks from it. She is an adventurer of the immediate. When she sleeps, she doesn’t fret about her dreams; she lets them take her. When she wakes, she is ready to leap into the next sensation.
Perhaps the most healing lesson Sauli has taught me is that worry is a theft. It steals the joy of the current moment and replaces it with a fear of a future that may never come to pass. When I find myself spiraling into the “what ifs,” I look at her. She is usually napping, her breathing steady and deep, her paws twitching as she runs through some canine dream. She is entirely unbothered. She trusts that tomorrow will take care of itself, or more accurately, she doesn’t even know that tomorrow is a thing to be feared.
To be more like Sauli is not to stop planning; it is to stop living in the future. It is the practice of anchoring oneself in the physical world. It is the understanding that our capacity for joy is not infinite, and every second spent in anxious foresight is a second of happiness surrendered. We can learn to carry our responsibilities without letting them carry us. We can learn to walk through the park of our lives and actually smell the air, instead of wondering if it’s going to rain next Tuesday.
Ultimately, Sauli never worries about tomorrow because she knows that the only thing she truly possesses is this breath, this heartbeat, and this connection. And in the end, isn’t that all any of us really have? If we could learn to trust the present as much as she does, we might find that tomorrow, when it finally arrives, is far less frightening than we ever imagined.
Let Your Pawrenting Journey Begin 