Walking the dog is a good example of the ability to live in the grey of uncertainty and hold two different thoughts at the same time. Psychologists use a fancy phrase to describe this state of mind: cognitive dissonance.
George Orwell pejoratively called it doublethink. Fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald called it the “test of a first rate intelligence” — the ability to hold two opposite ideas at the same time and still be able to function.
I’ll take the last definition as the one that suits me best.
For instance, when I take Prince Finski on his daily walk around Victoria Park Lake there is an unchanging routine. Hat, scarf, jacket, lead, excited whimpers, wild and sometimes unsuccessful lunge into the back of the station wagon, and a Beatles podcast.
It’s a predictable thing, like weekend rain in winter.
On the other hand, Finn’s daily walk is also a random act of chaos when anything can, and usually does, happen.
I can live with that too.
Take Monday’s walk.
It’s 3.15pm and the lake is a glassy grey under a scudded blue sky with a light, cool breeze — a routine winter’s day.
I open the rear of the wagon at the northern car park and Finn exits in an explosion of black and rusty hair to hit the ground standing before his back legs collapse with the realisation he is, in human terms, 91 years old and his hips are not the whip-crack springs they once were.
First, the thirsty new sapling gets a water. Then the drag up Pooh Lane begins with an obligatory black bag collection.
Up ahead, there’s a man being walked by two huskies who think they’re on the final leg of Amundsen’s race to the pole. They attempt an ambush as they pass us, but Roald and myself head our party dogs off with a yank of leads and a sympathetic nod.
As we round the bend of the grassy knoll, a boy sprints down the hill towards us yelling “Can I stroke your dog, mister?”
Nothing unusual here — just the usual obsession of children with big furry dogs. It’s a routine stroking session until Finn turns his head and licks the young fella on the hand, prompting a scream and a run back up the hill.
“He likes the taste of your fingers,” I shout after him, but the kid is already at the top of the knoll looking down on us with fascination and fear rippled across his face; a textbook example of cognitive dissonance.
We stroll down Glory Avenue where the fitness machines beckon like robots promising a better life if you just step on board.
There’s a wild-haired man ahead of us wearing a loose jacket and jeans halfway down his rear. Suddenly he turns, snorts and launches into an explosive run, arms flailing and jeans dragging as if he’s training for the Stawell Gift, or he’s just robbed a bank. Now there’s a perfect contender for the F. Scott Fitzgerald intelligence test — someone able to think simultaneously as a champion and a failure and who can still function as the average dreamer.
Next we round the corner into Sniff St where every little bush contains a nostalgic message from its last visitor.
An older woman approaches us and looks at me with bright blue eyes through a forest of wrinkles.
“Can I please stroke your dog?” she pleads in a shaky little voice.
“Of course,” I say. She bends down to ruffle Finn’s mane and flanks and then hugs him, burying her face in his fur, as if she has had no contact with another living being for 20 years.
She gets up and thanks us profusely.
“It’s so nice to stroke a dog, isn’t it?” she says.
I absolutely agree and we walk on.
On the other side of the lake we pass each other again. She smiles and her tiny blue eyes beam at us out of the forest. We’re friends.
And so our walk turns into another Doublethink Fitzgerald walk, where things are predictable and chaotic, routine and extraordinary, constant and forever changing at the same time.
After our walk there’s the constant reliability of a warm fire and a glass of red, which I don’t think F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote about.
8°C