As I was walking in Old Town last night, I found myself getting a little choked up every time somebody walking a dog passed by; and in NoVA, there are a LOT of dogs walking (Alexandria, for example, has more specially-designated “dog” parks than it does elementary schools) on any given evening.

It seems strange to me; Jersey’s passing was no particular surprise; she’d been giving us signals that she was getting ready to go for a long time. Heck, she didn’t even particularly like me much, at least in comparison to how she responded to Colleen and the kids. I was more than ready for the eventuality, yet I’m getting misty when I see some happy city dweller out with their happy dog. Even if I never had that kind of idealized dog relationship (and really, I didn’t, as much as I liked having her around), I still feel the loss; not just in terms of the absence of a life who’d been a fixture in mine for more than a decade, but in terms of missing out on circumstances that weren’t necessarily there. I’m not only mourning the loss of my dog, I’m mourning the loss of the potential of the relationship that never materialized.

That’s a problem with the way we humans are put together, I suppose. Even if we know that reality doesn’t entirely match up with our ideal, when we’re confronted with the reality, we still mourn the loss of the ideal, even if it never existed.

That doesn’t exactly feel like intelligent design to me, but, however inconvenient, it feels startlingly human.

Thankfully, through other accidents of evolution, we humans have also been given the ability to think beyond our hard-wired programming and transcend it; merely by recognizing the machinations at work here, we can take the first steps toward acceptance of incongruity.

I just wish it was easier. However, that’s just one more thing I need to learn to accept.