Life Lessons You Can Learn From a Beagle

I was taking a walk the other day and a car turned past me into a supermarket parking lot.

I noticed a dog in the passenger seat of the car.

Unlike what a lot of people do when riding in the passenger seat, this dog wasn’t looking at a cellphone or making a call or reading something; This beagle looked right at me … totally focused and checking things out!

I looked at the beagle and the beagle looked at me… and there was a moment there where I thought, “This dog knows what’s going on, this dog knows how to live!”

There is a really interesting piece on the WebMD website called,” 20 Things You Can Learn From Your Pet” and the lessons are super clear.

There were three tips listed about dogs I wanted to share with you:

The first one is live in the moment. That’s what that beagle was doing. Dogs just are there taking everything in and responding to what’s happening right in front of them. So often, when we’re thinking about the past or we’re worried about the future, we tend to lose track of what’s happening right in front of us, but dogs don’t do that. Dogs are totally focused on what’s going on right there in the moment.

The second is to walk every day. In my experience with the beagle, our roles were reversed as I was walking and the beagle was riding in a car … but the idea of just getting out and moving your own mass, using your own two legs to move around, is essential. I try to take three short walks during the day, 5 to 10 minutes; one time in the morning and twice in the afternoon. And it’s just great to get outside, there’s so many other benefits of doing that but an exercise physiologist remarked once to me that moving your own mass is also the most efficient way to exercise. There’s so many benefits to that.

The third is to love unconditionally. When you love someone, show them. And dogs do that. They don’t hold back, they don’t play hard to get. If they love you, you know it by how they act.  

There’s so much more we can learn from dogs! And although I don’t have a pet of my own, I learned a lot from that beagle riding by in the car.