Chapter 1: The Zen of Zoomies

7:43 PM on a Wednesday

It begins without warning, as the best things and the worst things always do.

I am on the couch. This is not a surprising development. I am on the couch and I am doing what I do most evenings between dinner and the moment I pretend I'm going to read a book but actually watch my phone until my eyes feel like two dried apricots: I am scrolling. Not scrolling toward anything. Not scrolling with purpose. Just scrolling in the way that a person treads water—not to go anywhere, but to avoid sinking.

My phone screen is a collage of mild dread. A news headline I won't click but will worry about. An Instagram post from someone I went to college with who appears to be living in Tuscany now, which seems unfair. A push notification from a language-learning app telling me, in a tone I can only describe as threatening, that I haven't practiced French in 147 days. And beneath all of that, throbbing like a bruise, the wellness notification. It's still there. Still sending reminders. Still believing in me.

On the opposite end of the couch, Rosie is lying on her side in a position that looks medically inadvisable—spine curved, one leg extended fully, head at an angle that suggests she has given up on the concept of necks. She has been in this position for forty minutes. She is, as far as I can tell, experiencing perfect peace.

And then, with no warning, no buildup, no discernible trigger—she's up.

Not “up” in the way a person gets up, which involves groaning, checking the time, and negotiating with gravity. Up in the way a firework goes up: instantly, completely, with total commitment to the vertical. Her eyes are wide. Her ears are forward. Something has shifted in the molecular structure of the universe that only she can detect, and she has responded by going from unconscious to fully operational in the time it takes me to blink.

She looks at me. I look at her. There is a half-second of perfect, loaded silence—the kind of silence that exists between a match being struck and the flame catching.

And then she runs.

Not toward anything. Not away from anything. She runs in a circle. A big, stupid, glorious, full-throttle circle that takes her from the couch to the kitchen doorway, through the kitchen, past the dining table, back to the living room, and around the ottoman so fast that I feel a breeze. She clips the coffee table with her hip. She does not care. She does not slow down. She does not even seem to notice. She has transcended furniture. She has transcended the physical limitations of a creature with four legs and no plan. She is running because her body contains more joy than can be expressed while stationary, and the only appropriate response is velocity.

Lap one. Lap two. Lap three. By lap four, I have put my phone down, because this is now the most interesting thing happening in my evening, and possibly in my week. By lap five, I am laughing. Not chuckling—laughing. The kind of laughing that comes from somewhere below your ribs and arrives without permission. She is so fast. She is so certain. She has absolutely no idea why she's doing this and she has never been more committed to anything in her life.

Lap six. Lap seven. She takes the corner by the bookshelf too wide, skids on the hardwood, recovers, keeps going. Her tongue is out. Her ears are flapping. She looks, and I mean this as the highest possible compliment, completely unhinged.

And then, as suddenly as it began, it's over. She stops. She stands in the middle of the living room, panting, eyes bright, tail going like a metronome set to allegro. She looks at me with an expression that, if I had to translate it, would read something like: You saw that, right? That was incredible. I'm incredible.

She walks back to the couch. She lies down. She is asleep within ninety seconds.

The whole event—from dead stillness to full-speed chaos to dead stillness again—lasted maybe two minutes. I stare at her sleeping form and I think a thought that is both very stupid and very important:

I have never committed to anything in my life the way this dog just committed to that lap around the ottoman.

My neighbor—the one on the corner who waves at everyone, though I wouldn't learn his name was Arthur for another few months—told me later that he'd watched the whole zoomies incident through his front window and considered calling to check on us. “I could hear the laughing from across the street,” he said. “And then this blur of brown fur past the window. I thought you'd lost control of the situation.” I had. That was the point.

The Problem with Being Everywhere at Once

Let's talk about where you are right now. Not geographically. Not in any grand philosophical sense. I mean: where is your attention? If you're anything like me—and you are, because you bought a book about a dog and mindfulness, which puts you squarely in my demographic—then the answer is: scattered.

Right now, as you read this paragraph, there is an excellent chance that part of your brain is also composing a grocery list, reviewing something that happened at work today, and periodically checking whether your phone has buzzed. You are reading this book, but you are not only reading this book. You are reading this book while also monitoring six other channels of input, like an air traffic controller who also has to do their taxes.

This is not a character flaw. This is the modern human condition. We have, collectively, become extraordinarily good at being sort-of-present in multiple places simultaneously and genuinely present in none of them. There's a name for what I'm describing. A researcher named Linda Stone calls it “continuous partial attention”—which is a very polite way of saying I am paying half-attention to seventeen things and full attention to nothing.

I want to be careful here, because I'm not interested in the “phones are bad, the old days were better” argument. The old days had cholera. I'll keep my phone. But I do think there's something worth examining in the fact that we have created a world so full of competing claims on our attention that being here—just here, just now, just this—has become the hardest thing we do.

Or rather, the hardest thing we do. For Rosie, it's not hard at all.