Sarah, founder
Juno doesn't check her phone. It sounds obvious, and it is obvious, but I keep coming back to it.
She wakes up when she wakes up. She looks at whatever is in front of her, for as long as it holds her attention. When she's done looking, she looks at something else. She doesn't seem to think about what she should be doing instead. She doesn't seem to think about what she was doing an hour ago, or what she's going to be doing at three in the afternoon. She's just there, at whatever the moment is asking of her, until it asks something different.
I used to think this was a limitation of being a dog. Now I'm not so sure it's a limitation.
There's a version of my life where I woke up and immediately reached for my phone. I would scroll for eleven minutes, sometimes seventeen, before I even sat up. I'd know what was happening in the news, what my friends had posted, what emails had come in overnight. I'd know all of this before I'd looked at my own face in the mirror, or noticed whether it was raining, or greeted the animal who had been waiting patiently beside my bed to say good morning to me for the last hour.
I'm not saying that version of my life was bad. It was just full. Full of other people's mornings, other people's news, other people's opinions about how the world was doing. And by the time I was full of all of that, I didn't have much space left for whatever was actually happening in my own life.
Juno started teaching me a different way, though she didn't mean to.
When we go on our walks, she stops. Constantly. At a smell. At a leaf. At something she can hear that I can't. In the first few months of having her, I would tug at the leash gently, thinking we needed to keep moving because we had somewhere to be. Then one morning I realized we didn't have anywhere to be. The walk was the thing. The walk was not a way of getting somewhere else. It was the somewhere.
So I started stopping too. Not just tolerating her stops, but stopping. Looking at whatever she was looking at. Waiting for as long as she wanted to wait. Not thinking about the emails, not planning the rest of the day, just standing there on the sidewalk with a dog, looking at a leaf.
I don't want to make this sound like a spiritual practice. It isn't. It's mostly just standing there. But I noticed something after a while, which is that I got better at doing that when I wasn't with her. I got better at reading a book without checking my phone. I got better at eating lunch without a screen open. I got better at looking at the person I was talking to instead of composing my next sentence while they were still talking.
The word people use for this is attention. It's the muscle we've been quietly losing over the last fifteen years, and losing it has cost us more than we know. Attention is how you actually experience being alive. It's the difference between having done a thing and having felt yourself do it.
Juno doesn't have to work on her attention. She just has it. She was born with it and nobody took it away from her.
I'm slowly getting mine back. Some of it is the mornings, before anyone starts asking anything of me. Some of it is the walks, going her pace instead of mine. Some of it is the practice, the ten minutes on the mat where I try to breathe without also thinking about what to make for dinner.
I don't think there's a big lesson here. I don't think I have arrived at any kind of enlightenment. But I do notice that when I put the phone down on the counter and let it stay there while I make coffee, I feel less rushed. And I notice that when Juno and I go on our afternoon walk, the walk feels like an actual event, not a thing I did on the way to something else.
She's asleep on the bench under the window as I write this. It's spring now. The light is different than it was in February when I started this business. Different in a way I probably wouldn't have noticed a year ago. But I notice now.
Juno, of course, has always noticed. She's not impressed with me for catching up.