A writing exercise: seeing

So my plan to get up early enough to do a writing exercise, do my morning pages, meditate, and walk Chloe is off to a rocky start. Today I only managed to walk Chloe and do morning pages. But as "punishment" for myself, I am promising to fit those four things in at some other time of the day if I don't get to them in the morning (save for walking Chloe, which definitely has to be done in the morning!).

So, here's an exercise, courtesy of Room to Write by Bonni Goldberg. The instructions were to see an item using your imagination, intuition, and instinct, and then to comment on which type of seeing was hardest for you.

This morning I wore my old, out-of-date-prescription glasses to the dog park. So, as another dog and owner entered the park, I couldn't see them well. All I saw was a golden blob and a person layered in a ski jacket. This might have been Chloe's friend Barley, or it might have been a potentially mean dog I didn't know. Chloe was off leash, and she wasn't listening to my calls for her to come.

My intuition told me to let her go. She usually only doesn't listen to me around dogs she knows and loves. But my imagination saw all sorts of possibilities, a dog fight being the most prominent. And what exactly is a person supposed to do if her dog gets involved in a fight? It seems awfully dangerous to try to grab your dog with all those teeth bared and adrenaline flowing. So then the image of my hand getting bitten off by my own friendly dog ran through my imagination.

I can't remember what my instinct saw. Maybe it saw that getting in the middle of a (imaginary) dog fight is a bad idea, no matter how much you'd like to save one of the pooches.

But, in any case, as I heard the voice of the other dog owner, I didn't need to see clearly to know that it was, indeed, Barly and his mom.