My Sweet has no use for Facebook or social media in general except to glance occasionally from the seat beside me and ask “Who is that?”
It’s a bit like having someone read over your shoulder, actually it’s exactly like having someone read over your shoulder, and it drives me crazy. Sometimes I’ll tell him what’s going on if it’s relevant to him at all, but mostly I tell him if he wants to know what’s going on in the Land of Facebook, he needs to get his own account.
What he does like to do on the internet is scroll through the buy and sell sites like Kijiji. He likes to read what people advertise, specifically the titles of the ad because sometimes they’re amusing like the time my friend was advertising for ‘one night stand’. She was looking for a bedside table but that sure isn’t what it sounded like!
Two nights ago, he is happily scrolling through the ads when he looks my way and says in his most serious voice, “Don’t look. Just don’t.”
Which has the opposite effect because now all I want is to see is whatever it is he doesn’t want me to see. It’s childish, I know, but be honest – who out there doesn’t start saying, “What? What is it? Let me see.”
So he shows me.
It’s an ad for a dog, but not just any dog. It’s an ad for a six month old medium-sized Labradoodle puppy. It is exactly the kind of dog we have said we would get if we were ever to get another dog which we have many, many times agreed we will not be doing.
Just over two years ago, we lost our Molly. She was the sweetest natured chocolate lab and we miss her, both us of. We have also agreed that we aren’t really at the right place to have another dog: we’re travelling, we don’t want to have to rush home from town to let a dog out, we hate the thought of losing another dog…we have all kinds of reasons why having a dog right now is not the best idea.
No problem. We look, we agree it’s an adorable puppy, and if only we were at a different point in our lives it would probably be the right dog for us. And we move on.
The next day, we’re driving to town and I don’t think anything dog-related was even part of the conversation when My Sweet says out of the blue, “I can’t believe I’m the one having to be the hardass about getting another dog!”
Ummmm……what? Were we talking about a dog? I was under the impression we agreed, regardless of the fact that this was the perfect dog, we were NOT interested.
Apparently, one of us was mistaken.
This morning, I wake up and halfway through my first coffee, I make a critical mistake. I look at My Sweet and say, “You won’t believe it, but I dreamed we went and looked at a dog.”
How was I to know he was sitting across the table, silently scrolling through Kijiji ads?
He looks up and says, “The ad is still active.”
“What ad?”
I know. That was a dumb question.
“You know how we will know if it’s meant to be?”
“If we’re meant to have the dog or not. We can send an email and if they reply, it’s meant to be.”
Do you see how subtly he has sucked me into this? Made me complicit? He started using the pronoun ‘we’. Oh sure, he’s a real hardass, my husband. Sheesh.
And somehow, suddenly, he is composing an email (normally my job) and he’s reading it back to me and editing it and he’s hitting SEND. And I’m speechless, slightly agog because now here we sit, waiting to hear back and I keep asking myself, “How did this happen? How did this get so out of control?”
You can fast forward about 24 hours. Think of the happenings in between like skipping the ads when you PVR your favourite show. It was mostly watching the email folder for incoming emails anyway.
Messages came in, but never the one we were waiting for. There still hasn’t been any reply and the ad has disappeared from Kijiji. Apparently, it wasn’t meant to be.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that. I have mixed feelings. When you’ve had pets for any length of time and then they’re gone, the house feels empty. No one greets you at the door, wagging with excitement. (I tried once for Phil’s sake, but apparently my efforts weren’t appreciated because he asked me not to do it again.) On the other hand, if we are in town and decide to stay late and have supper, we don’t have to worry about whether the dog will be ok in the house for another hour or if we’ll have to clean up a mess when we get there. That’s a joke. There’s no ‘we’ when there are messes to be cleaned. There’s just ‘me’.
I guess it doesn’t matter. The thing we had suddenly convinced ourselves that we wanted, well, we couldn’t have it.
That happens a lot in life. We set our hearts and minds on something, sometimes we work as hard as we can to get it, and despite our best efforts, it just doesn’t happen. We don’t get the job, we don’t get into the school we want, the other person isn’t interested. We are turned down, rejected, and we are disappointed.
And here is where you need to ask yourself one simple question: how badly do I really want this?
If you’re willing to accept that maybe the object of your heart’s desire isn’t so big a deal, you can walk away. But there are times when what looks like or sounds like a ‘no’, just isn’t acceptable. Maybe it’s just a detour, maybe you need to come at things from a different angle, maybe you need to dig a little deeper and work a little harder.
I have a friend who has been pursing a dream. She has had more setbacks and roadblocks than seems fair and yet she re-evaluates, reconsiders, and, like an off-track GPS, she recalculates. Sure, she gets frustrated and discouraged, but her persistence is astonishing and there is not a doubt in my mind that she will achieve her goal eventually.
So how badly did we want this dog? Not badly enough to phone instead of emailing. Not even badly enough to send a second email.
I guess we’re just not quite ready, but the fact that it got this far is telling and maybe the next time an opportunity arises, we’ll grab hold with both hands and fight for it a little harder.
All so true!!!