The right to disconnect

Slowing down. This word sounds as much as if I was told to wax my pubic area with lime.

I live in a very stimulating environment for the senses, whether it is the auditory, visual, or emotional ones.

Doing nothing. You'd make some of my colleagues and clients smile, even laugh. The last time I went on vacation, the only two reasons that led me to "do nothing" were: I was tired after a six-hour hike in the mountains, and I was having a lunch on a beach while listening to the waves.

We live in a world where everything moves fast, where sitting in the grass to watch ducks is already deemed as a waste of time. Walk in Paris, wander through the subway halls, go from point A to point B, and you'll end up caught in the whirlwind of hurried steps if you do not resist fiercely. We hasten to live faster without taking the time to experience anything. We assign the role of rival to people we barely meet. Everything becomes a competition. It's all about who can reach the next traffic light first.

I gave myself eight days off. I had a plan I thought would be nice, one that would have even made me feel rich (given the price of gas, hihi). Hikes here and there. Explorations and discoveries. Plus, the weather turned out to be mild: sunshine and blue skies. Except that... for my future well-being and peace of mind, I gave all that up to slow down, to take the time to do each small task, to take naps; actually, reluctantly, because you can't fix a sprain by mistreating it.

Meanwhile, I thought about all those times our dogs are bombarded with stimuli without being able to slow down, without being able to sit, observe, or sniff for more than four seconds.

Disconnecting is just as essential for them. Their senses work very differently than ours: they can perceive sounds up to 55,000 hertz (for the most gifted humans: up to 20,000 hertz), residual sounds up to 25 meters (whereas we only perceive them up to 5 meters), they perceive movements in fast motion (so imagine when they're walking in a crowd with all those two-legged creatures close by), they can't perceive colors in the red spectrum, and they're nearsighted. That's for the physiological side of things. Because on top of that, they're asked to adapt into a world where they do not understand the language or the customs.

So what can we do for them ?

For instances, you can :

➤ have them taken care of while you're not home in case they suffer from being alone

➤ walk them in places without the aversive stimulations for them

➤ leave them time to watch, sitting, as long as they feel like it

➤ let them snif as long as they feel like it