Caring that means something

This morning's walk ran a little long. I had taken the car in for repairs and had to walk home, and with me was Wolfy, our one-year-old sire, a black terrier. He isn't used to long distances and has no stamina for them, so along the way I simply carried him in my arms. And as we walk like that, the most ordinary thoughts weave through my mind.

Oh, when I get home a mountain of laundry is waiting for me, I think to myself. And what if I just didn't wash it? The moment you put it away, a new pile gathers. Every day you wash something, every day you tidy something, every day you care for someone.

And then my thoughts drift back to the years when my daughters were still small. I remember how I could hardly wait for them to grow up — so I wouldn't have to get up so early for work, kindergarten and school. How I dreamed of weekends with a little peace at last, when there'd be less cooking, less washing, less checking whether the children had made it safely to school. Back then there were no smartphones; at work they even reproached me for being on the landline too much, when I'd call home to check whether they had woken up and left.

And when I look around me now … that time of peace actually lasted only a brief moment. When they were teenagers and you could breathe a little easier — that was it. Now the story repeats, only in a different guise. We have cameras through which we watch our dogs. I care for them, I bathe them — sometimes it seems to me even more often than I once did the children. I tie their long little hairs into topknots, I make sure they eat well, that they poop well and that their little tummies don't ache because I may have given them too much food or too little water. Everything has to be served to them.

These are daily duties I set for myself — of course. And when I look back at the end of the day, or when I'm not quite aware of what I'm actually doing, I become almost restless. I ask myself: what did I even do today? For these are such small things that they seem self-evident to me, and it doesn't even occur to me that this is, in fact, work. But it is. Somewhere abroad, someone is paid for exactly this — employed to brush, bathe and feed dogs. To me it is simply the rhythm of every day, and I am hardly aware of how I serve my dogs, because it is a part of me, a part of my life.

And in the end … I am clearly a person who needs to have work — the work that truly needs doing. If there isn't any, I feel as though I've done nothing. Even when I research, write articles or some post — my mind is busy the whole time, and yet I still don't feel I've accomplished anything. And sometimes two or three hours slip by as I search and browse online for how to make my dogs' lives better and whether I'm doing right by them.

So now, having come home and already in the middle of putting all these things away, I first make myself a coffee. That real coffee, where you take a moment to think things through and study them well. But it isn't rest in the true sense. With one eye I keep a close watch on the puppies — how they're developing, how they move, what character each one shows, that they don't accidentally get hurt. I watch how they get along with one another and, in the end, how they get along with the grown dogs. For nothing here is self-evident. The grown dogs of course won't do them any harm, but they may show them something they don't like — though that may just be part of their perfectly ordinary dog language.

And then I ask myself: when will that moment come, when I'll be able to worry a little less?

The answer is simple: that moment won't come.

People like me always find something to care for. Without it, life would simply be too dull. It is exactly what drives us — a fragment of what we set ourselves to experience in this world. If I stopped caring, a part of me would die, would age too quickly, and would not live the thing I set out to live on this planet. So my work is precisely this, which I do with love — and even if, after hours of browsing online, I sometimes tell myself that “I did nothing,” in truth, with love in my eyes, I do everything.