Dogs, cats and children remind me of all the joy in small things

By David McElroy · April 25, 2018

As I get ready for bed tonight, I feel a sense of joy and satisfaction which I didn’t feel when I left work at 5 p.m.

The last six weeks or so have been very stressful. My father’s death has intensified a lot of old hurts that haven’t gone away. It’s been difficult to deal with the flood of emotions since I’m alone and haven’t had someone to help me work things through. And I’ve been preoccupied with other issues that make it difficult to get through my work day.

But when I came home, I was greeted by some cats. Some grumpy. Some happy. All hungry.

Then I took Lucy out for some exploring in the neighborhood. Before I knew it, the painful old emotions were set aside. The stress of the day was forgotten. I just got to enjoy time alone with a beautiful creature who loves and adores me.

There are so many things in my life — and in this world — which pull me toward feeling miserable, but Lucy and the cats and the children I encounter all make me feel joy. They make me feel happy to be alive.

I don’t have the things that I need right now to make me happy and satisfied in the long run, but in spite of that, this world can be an amazing place.

There’s so much beauty and joy and delight. It’s always there, but sometimes it’s hard to notice. It’s really easy to focus on the ugly parts, especially when media have discovered they can make far more money by screaming terrible things at us and emphasizing divisions between us.

There’s an old song by Christian singer/songwriter Bob Bennett that illustrates this well. Here’s how “Madness Dancing” starts:

In the middle of this madness I am dancing
Though I’m not sure why just now
I tried to be sober, tried to be logical
But I could not stop my feet
I know I have not turned off my mind
I know there’s evil all around me
But for now, it’s outside
And I am in my room
And joy is like a crashing tide

We do have choices. We can choose to focus on the things which make us miserable or we can find the things which give us joy — and take as much joy from those things as we possibly can.

I’m not Pollyanna. I’m not suggesting we can magically wish away unhappiness or bad life situations. I’m just saying we can choose to find joy in small things. At least sometimes. We can put ourselves as close to joy as we can get under our circumstances.

It makes me happy when I walk through the door at the end of the day and Lucy acts as though she’s the luckiest girl in the world that I’ve returned.

It makes me happy when three-legged, green-eyed Bessie wakes up from her nap and looks at me with the expectation that I’ve come to give her the dinner she wants. I need her to need me.

It makes me happy when I’m in a restaurant and the toddler at the next table is more interested in playing peek-a-boo with me than with eating her dinner. (It helps when her family thinks it’s cute and they’re not annoyed with me distracting her, of course.)

I get joy and happiness from children and dogs and cats and sunsets and the hope of looking into the eyes of love again.

I get joy from taking photos of my animal friends and of nature around me. (Just imagine how much joy I’m going to get from photographing my own children one day — if they want to cooperate.)

There’s so much ugliness in this world. There’s so much squalor and unhappiness. There’s misery everywhere.

But there’s also love. There’s hope. There’s joy.

I don’t have everything that I want in life. I haven’t achieved all my goals or built the family that I’d like to build. I’m not yet where I had hoped to be by now.

But there’s so much joy to find in this world.

I watched a stunning sunset Tuesday night. I spent time outside exploring with my Lucy Wednesday night. I had purring cats who are happy to see me.

Those things don’t change the things that I wish were different, but the joy I get from them makes everything else worth enduring — and they remind me to hold onto hope that I’ll one day have the things I want and need.

So I thank my Lucy for bringing me joy this evening in the midst of this world’s madness. There’s plenty more joy waiting all around me — just waiting for me to find it.

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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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