Walking With Revolution

Brief Thoughts on Walking a Dog

I have a dog I hate.

My youngest daughter, Kate, has long wanted a puppy, so this summer we got one, a labradoodle. Kate named the dog — due to our family’s love of the American Revolution — “Revolution,” or “Rev” for short.

Rev has become my dog.

I didn’t want it this way. Because she’s clingy (part and parcel with her breed), and I work from home, she has become my constant companion, whether I like it or not. I don’t really like, but I’ve become accustomed to her presence, especially on our daily walks.

Rev needs at least one 45-minute exercise session a day. It would be best for her to have two. As part of my daily exercise regime. I’ve taken to walking her 2-3 miles 4-6 days a week. I wanted to tire her out and force a nap so I could get work done, but walking now has become a kind of spiritual practice for me.

My friend, Tara Beth Leach, put me on to an important book to listen to while I walk, Mark Buchanan’s God Walk: Moving At The Speed of Your Soul. Buchanan dedicates an entire chapter to walking with animals, but it’s mostly about dogs.

Buchanan writes about being perplexed by the existence of paid dog walkers in cities like New York.

Walking a dog is one of the great burdens and great joys of having a dog. Dogs tend to be needy, hungry, lazy, messy, but everything in them wakes up when you say the word walk. All the dogs in my life could go from coma to ecstasy in a breath at just the least suggestion of the tiniest hint of the slightest possibility of a walk. And somehow that joy is infectious. Who could not be happy walking a dog?¹

I’m not quite sure about Buchanan’s romance about dog walking, but there is something to be found in the walk itself — with or without the dog. With the dog, I find, what a spiritual director told me was humility. “No matter what you do or accomplish,” she said, “you’re the guy who picks up dog sh*t. There’s no way to think more of yourself than you ought, when you’re carrying a bag of poop in your hand.”

Without the dog, if I ever walk alone again, walking provides me, again, with humility. Scale is the first of our illusions broken when walking. When I drive trough my neighborhood, the task takes mere minutes. When I walk, an hour. My subdivision is bigger than I often recognize.

I also see the eyes and smiles of fellow walkers and runners — the older couples staying healthy and connected, the athletes trainer for their next race, the sick working to get well. I notice the broken fences along my path and old, rusted playground sets, signs on families with children now too old for simple play. There’s a house on our route. Its mailbox is overflowing and a small SUV sits half on and half off the edge of the driveway. One of the tires is flat. Something is going on. Something has been going on. I wouldn’t have noticed that by simply driving.

On our walk today, if the status quo hasn’t changed, I will call the police for a wellness check on that house, cause clearly, behind those doors all is not well. Perhaps the home owner has been on a long trip and didn’t make arrangements to stop their mail nor have a friend collect it. A harried escape or a friendless existence also means all is not well.

Throughout the scriptures, whether figuratively, but most often literally, the women and men who know and love God best spend a lot of time walking. And not simply because they lack other means of transportation, though that is true. And they weren't walking their dogs either. Dogs don’t come off well in the Jewish or Christian Bible. They walk because on the walk we see, we listen, we talk, we notice.

As spring returns, here’s my encouragement to you: Don’t get a dog, but do go for a walk. Let me know what you see.

1. Mark Buchanan. God Walk: Moving At The Speed of Your Soul (pg. 98)