Working from home, I get to spend every waking hour with my dog. It’s an oddly inspiring thing to watch him experience life and every day I make a conscious effort to think from his perspective. I wonder what it must be like to see new things that blow your mind every single day. The first time Madden saw a plastic grocery bag he flipped out. He sees me holding a napkin and thinks it’s this amazing object to be smelled, licked, chewed. You know, experienced. Don’t get me started on his first glimpse of fire.

I once tied a rope around an old toy he was getting bored with and he took to it as if I had just wrapped a hotdog in bacon and dipped it in ice cream. A tiny change had completely altered his reality in a flash.

The other night we took him to a nearby park where we played fetch in the outfield and then hung out at the skate park. Imagine what a skateboarder must look like to a dog. Fresh external stimuli colliding with the mind of a 9-month-old puppy is an amazing thing. It inspires me as a creative to perceive the world this way. To find earth-shattering change in minutiae. To be moved by the mundane. 

Ignorance is not bliss, ignorance sucks. Simplicity is bliss. Simplicity makes the outlandish and complex plausible and solvable. Simplicity is the mind processing a mountain of data and spitting out a brick. This is a dangerous idea when done improperly and can lead to fundamentalism. But simplicity leads to unimaginable levels of insight. I can’t speak from any personal experience, but people have been getting high for centuries seeking simplicity. To alter reality by inhalation. Shut out the noise and let the daimons drum up what they will. In that space everything is possible, everything is “so simple.” This perpetually altered reality is a dog’s world. Who thinks more “outside the box” than a dog? Box? What box? 

The arch of progress will always lean towards simplicity. Be as the dog.