No secret here. I love our dogs.
Dang. When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to have a dog. I don’t recall ever really wanting one. We were sort of instilled with the belief that dogs were mean. And dirty. Dogs were just no good at all.

Steer clear… or you’ll get bit. So. I believed it. It was all I knew growing up.

I’d like to get off the subject of dogs for just a moment and switch gears about that very thing. When we are young, we receive a LOT of conditioning. It seems to be the natural order of things. Our parents give us the same ideas their parents gave them… and on and on. We are surrounded by people… pretty much just like us…. when we are growing up.

Rural white America, for example. Catholic private school, for another. Inner-city poverty, as one more citation. But the scope of how we are raised in our own little “pockets” of the world is far and wide.
But as children, we only know what we are shown… mostly.

So we learn about life, and religion, and politics… just that way.

As adults we are exposed to other things. Sometimes we open our minds and listen to different possibilities. Other times, we just keep that tunnel vision. It is all that we know… it is all that we want to know. Our parents were that way… and we have always been that way. So. Stay the course.

I wonder about this thought process. Because… at every level of our lives… if we don’t consider all the possibilities…. we never find those new things we grow to love.

Like Strawberry Short Cake, Roller Coaster Rides, Dill Pickles…. a different view of religion, or politics…. or perhaps, even …. changing our mind about dogs.

And those “mean & dirty” dogs… of my youth…. . have turned out to be one of the best parts of my every, single day….. now that I’ve grown a little older. And hopefully, a little wiser.

“The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.” – E.B. White