It is inevitable: every summer, somewhere in the middle of the holidays, I am struck by a kind of blues that I explain myself badly.
The weather is nice, I run and ride by bicycle, I have a resting, tanned body, the house is in order – I mean: there is nothing to paint or repair – the courtyard is in bloom, the trees, all green, loaded with leaves, join the sky. The days are still long, Montreal is quiet, emptied of half of its inhabitants, we see family, friends. And yet, I find a way to think about life that passes too quickly, the growing children, everything that remains to be done. I saw a small inner tumult.
When I share my moods from him, my blonde laughs gently: “This is your philosophical moment. It is true that it is the same thing every year.
It is enough that I stop a little, that I really stop, to ask myself how I do to run all the rest of the year. The train is at the station, I hear it, it is about to leave, I am alone on the platform and ask myself if I want to go up.
To change my ideas, I bring my Facebook and Instagram sons unrolled, there are happy people, others who are in full promotion of this or that, but also, it is unmissable, a crowd of permanently indignant who tear their shirt, for everything and for nothing.
I hear about a jeans ad, which would be “appalling” racism. And a pig, yes, a pig, in Lasalle, Timmy that he is called, that the municipal administration threatened with expulsion before changing his mind. My God, it’s going badly. They never take a vacation, these people.
Notice, there are real reasons to be indignant. I think of Gaza, the unnameable horror that it has become, these children who are hungry, to this field of ruins, while the great powers call – finally, but too late – Israel for moderation. What does it look like, a “moderate” famine, a “moderate” massacre?
My dog obviously does not ask these kinds of questions. He knows nothing about the world, otherwise what he perceives in the narrow ray where he is allowed to exist.
He’s hungry, he eats. He is tired, he sleeps. He wants to warm up, he searches for light, sets in on the flowerbed chair, in full sun. Ponyo, her name is (she is a female), in honor of the little Miyazaki mermaid.
I still remember the day we went to get it, from a Mascouche breeder. It was Valentine’s Day. The girls had returned from school, we announced to them: “Tonight we buy a dog!” They still remember it. We too. It was a pure, perfect joy.
My oldest had been talking about it for years. On the island of the Visitation, during a walk, she had even kneel in front of a cross – the one that recalls the death of Father Viel, drowned in the river of the meadows in this very place, in 1625 – to ask God to give him a dog.
And that day, God, it was us. She had chosen the quieter dog (you speak), stuck on her brothers and sisters. When returning to the car, the dog was crying, and my youngest, large sensitive, had also been crying. A beast so small that had arrived at home, she had managed to hide in one of my winter boots. Fragile life.
At the time of writing, the dog is extended with all its long, half -closed eyes, the air of a Zen Buddhist. This is its Shih Tzu side, I imagine.
Sometimes he raises his head, gives me a distracted look, I wonder if he thinks of something, or if it is the void, the “nothing”, who inhabits him. I then call him the “little philosopher dog”. I know people who pay dearly to reach such a state of serenity.
But it’s a funny beast, trapped in extremes. It is enough for another dog to walk on the sidewalk that borders the courtyard so that mine loses the pedals. I may then remind you of order, he japs, growls, short from right to left, hops, wants to lend me. “Ponyo, do you want to tell me why you get angry?” And it’s even worse during walks, when he meets a similar: he goes crazy.
It is said that some dogs, too used to humans, are difficult to live with their fellows when they find them, do not understand them, do not know how to interact – and who did not experience the same thing?
At these moments, I apologize to the other master, I treat my dog with “mesa adapted”, and sometimes even “psychiatric case”, a way of admitting that I did not have it well. And I’m not exaggerating so much. A few years ago, the veterinarian advised us to make him follow a therapy to manage his anxiety. I had answered TAC: “The masters already consult. I was talking about our own anxiety.
Anxiety, I spent a good part of my life taming it. It is a fierce beast, perhaps indomitable. But I sometimes think that it is the expression of life itself, its most intimate vibration.
Can we really live without being anxious, without experiencing, in one way or another, the lack-of everything that remains to be done-and the danger-of everything that could arise? Isn’t there in what makes me want, love, write, teach a necessary anxiety?
In the middle of the summer, in this compulsory break where my spirit is agitated, I seek the courage to go up on the train. And I find it, at random from a reading, in Jean Jaurès: “Courage is to understand its own life, to specify it, to deepen it, to establish it and to coordinate it however to general life. […] Courage is to love life and look at the death of a quiet look1. »
1. Jean Jaurès, Youth discourse1903
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