Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.
Interpretation
Animals accept life and death more gracefully than humans, teaching us about grief and healing.
This quote suggests that animals have an innate understanding of their mortality, facing life and death with acceptance. In contrast, humans often struggle with the pain of losing them, but this grief can serve as a healing process, helping us navigate other, more complex sorrows in life.
In practice
During a memorial service for a beloved pet, this quote could be shared to honor their life and the lessons they taught us.
You really do learn every day with every dog; they are all so unique and different. But if you're patient and you understand where they're coming from, and if you are consistent, they will be fine. They teach you to give your full attention.
I find with records, they become what they're going to become. They take on a power and a direction of their own. Part of making records is to honor that and not try to force it.
There's a certain grace in accepting what your life is and embracing all the good things that have been - but there's still an expectation of good things to come. Not necessarily what you expected.
I didn't have any money. I had a sense of terrible loss. But what I also had was a fire in my belly. I wasn't going to go back to waiting tables. I felt I had to be better at fronting a band.
I look at my voice and my abilities as a gift. I don't feel that I can even take any credit for it, but it's such a huge presence in my life. It is my life. It's my identity, it's everything. And it's given me a great deal of joy and a sense of purpose - I can't imagine my life without it.
Watergate just happened to come along at the same time as the demand for honesty in relations between the sexes, in advertising, in ecology, in almost everything. It just stumbled into that great big elephant trap that had already been built for it.
Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.
Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.
I had a sense then of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we'd never be able to go on.
Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
We must recognize what in our accepted tradition is damaging to our fate and dignity-and shape our lives accordingly.
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