| Excerpts from Lessons to Live By: The Canine Commandments |
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| ...Someone once said that life is not a dress rehearsal. We only get one crack at it. Unlike a play at the theater, we don’t have to follow a script, or worry about making a mistake. What we do have to accept is that we only get to do it once. You might think that the reason dogs enjoy every day is that they have a relatively short life. But the dogs probably don’t know this. If dogs lived to be 100, they’d probably just have that many more days to live to their fullest. While we all wonder what heaven is going to be like, dogs live it. -- from Commandment V: Live for today |
| copyright W.R. Pursche 2004 Read more excerpts, dog quotes, and life lessons from dogs here! |
| In his book Dogs Never Lie About Love, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson talks of how humans tend to judge things, and always compare the present with an idealized past. A friend admonishes him for his habit: “Why do you compare one beach to another? You are here now; enjoy it for what it is.” Isn’t it amazing how often we do this? Instead of really looking at and enjoying what is right in front of us, we are constantly comparing our experiences to what happened in the past, or to what we think should happen. Sometimes we even compare it to an idealized image we have in our own minds. Doing this will almost certainly guarantee that we will be disappointed, because ‘reality’ will never meet our perfect expectations. Yet even knowing this we do it all the time. As Roy Blout says in his poem, people are constantly “fretting” about seeking bliss and perfection, instead of appreciating what they have, and appreciating life itself. We tend to let this way of thinking affect our relationships as well. We compare our relationships to perfect TV and Hollywood-created images of perfect couples, perfect marriages, perfect families, perfect friends. Next to these images, the reality of life falls short, and what gets highlighted are the shortcomings, not the beauty of what we already have and opportunities that we can create. We’ll never know whether dogs ever think in terms of ‘comparisons,’ but as we watch a dog chew merrily on a bone, it’s hard to imagine he is thinking “it’s too bad this bone isn’t as good as the one I had last week!” Instead, he seems to get 100 percent enjoyment out of that bone. In the same way, as a dog rolls around on the grass, he doesn’t seem to be comparing his experience (and limiting his obvious joy) to another patch of grass or a prior experience. Dogs will exercise in any place, in any weather, in total enjoyment... |
| Dogs seem to be happy all the time, with no worries, no cares, living every day to the fullest. How do they do this? In this moving and uplifting work, W. R. Pursche examines how dogs live and translates their way of life into lessons for us to live by. Unlike other negative ‘rules’ that are often thrown at us (“Don’t do this! Don’t do that!”) these lessons are all appealingly positive. More than just a book of dog quotes or stories, and filled with examples from everyday life, Lessons to Live By: The Canine Commandments plainly shows how we can all benefit from the wisdom of dogs. Whether or not you have a dog or even like dogs, these memorable life lessons from dogs will provide you or someone you know with a straightforward and uncomplicated approach to living a happier and more fulfilling life. |
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| What people are saying about the book: "A great dog gift book!" |