If Dogs Run Free, Then Why Can't We?

When I was a little girl an older woman who babysat my sister and me cooked what she called, refrigerator stew. Refrigerator stew is a kind of highbrow name for what I would now respectfully call, cooking one’s compost; let me explain.

Our babysitter would take all possible ingredients out of her fridge, foods that for one reason or another could not be fashioned into their own respective edible dishes; a hodgepodge of half eaten vegetables, grains, beans, and broths. Sometimes she would throw in already cooked leftovers from meals earlier in the week. She would then take this mishmash of ‘almost garbage’ and toss it into a big pot, season it with salt and pepper, and then set it on the stove, where it would sit and stew on medium low heat until dinner time. All afternoon the indistinguishable and unappetizing smell of simmering vegetables was all pervasive and unavoidable.

Many days over the past seven months have felt like a steaming pot of refrigerator stew. The rancid smell of disappointment, loneliness, anxiety, grief, division, and disbelief wafting up, assaulting the senses, and causing so many of us to lose our appetites for the beauty, hope and deliciousness of our lives, and the world.  

Last week was tough, and I know for certain I am not the only one who felt that toughness. The stress of this pandemic, the long overdue racial reckoning, political debates, financial strain, uncertainty; each one of the myriad of obstacles we are currently facing is an unrelenting challenge to move through on its own; but add them all together and you have a rotten smelling refrigerator stew that is certain to produce indigestion for the lucky, and loss of appetite or mild food poisoning for the rest.  And yet, like any nasty recipe, any rotten batch of soup, any pile of garbage, any injustice, any shitty experience, any pathetic politician, any hardship or struggle, there are two sides to this story; there are two sides to your story.

One side is numb complacently, the other is creativity and new possibility. In other words, there are two ways to eat refrigerator stew: to lament the disgust and eat it anyway, or to recognize that something went wrong and is terribly rotten, and to learn to cook up something nourishing and delicious from that understanding. 

I went for a trail run last week on one of those tough, refrigerator stew kind of days. During that run I witnessed a very annoyed and frustrated man holler at his golden retriever who was running around and playing in the water of the nearby lake. Over and over again he shouted “No, No, No” at his dog as the pooch repeatedly careened into the shallow muddy water and swam through the emerald green surface algae. The more the man yelled, “What are you doing?”, “What a mess” , “Get out of there,” the more his dog double down on playtime enjoyment.
The beauty of nature, the possibility for love, enjoyment, and freedom was an equal invitation to each of them that day; and yet one of them stood angrily on the shore, disappointed and controlling, while the other paraded happily, lovingly, and freely in the beauty of the moment.

So perhaps I was wrong before when I said there are two sides to a story; perhaps there are actually two different stories, each running parallel along the course of each of journeys. One story is pretty and one is ugly; one is present, and one is stuck in the past or the future. One story is of control, fear, anxiety, disappointment, struggle, and forcefulness; and one story is of space, meaning, dreams, beauty, freedom, and true value. One story is our darkness, and one story is our lightness. We are both that dog careening towards joy, and that controlling human standing cemented by resistance. We are both, smelling the rottenness of that refrigerator stew that’s been on the stove far too long, and we are the cooks learning to create something better and finding the new recipe that will nourish us and taste of the beauty of a thriving world.

My day feels different, the pandemic feels different, and my life changes for the better when I honor both my stories, my story of darkness and struggle, and my story of freedom and opportunity. I have within me a commanding expecting human that wants to scream ‘ no, no, no’ when life gets messy, unfair, and out of my control; and, I have within me a wild and free spirited animal who yearns to run free through the mud and swim through all the muck and uncertainty with excited interest.

Maybe normalcy is just refrigerator stew, the story of how we’ve been stuck and complacent; and maybe change is our invitation to find a new recipe, the story of how we realize that we are actually free to run.