Touch the Skye: There are times when I get pushed to my limit..

..Like when my dog takes my ipod out of my backpack when I'm sleeping, and chews it up!
What kind of INSANE dog does that?!?!?!
Well, apparently Trixie does.
Sometimes she reminds me of that crazy dog Marley off of 'Marley and Me.'
I have to say I was furious when I found it, I just sat there moaning.. "Why...Why.. Why?!?!?"

But then, I began to feel selfish.

It comes down to the point where it is thing versus person.
We make the choice. Will we chose the thing? Or the person?
This reminds me of a part from "The Last Lecture" by Dr. Randy Pausch. My biology teacher has shown this to our class a few times.

In this lecture, he mentions more than once the importance of choosing a person over an object.
He tells how when he was a child, his parents let him paint on his walls. He said "The great thing was that they let me do it. They thought that letting me express my creativity was more important than the pristine nature of the walls."

His parents had taught him about the importance of people vs. things.
He describes another incident. He had just bought a new car, and was going to take his niece and nephew for a weekend so his sister could get a break. His sister was explaining to the kids that they had to be very careful and couldn't get it dirty. They thought this was hilarious, because over her shoulder, he was emptying a can of soda onto the back seat.
As they were driving home after the weekend, his nephew Chris had the flu and threw up all over the backseat of the car. "I don't care how much value you get out of owning a nice shiny pristine thing, it's not as good as I felt knowing that I made an 8 year old boy not feel guilty just because he had the flu."

The point here is, that we mustn't forget the value of a person. Or in my case, my dog.
My ipod is just a thing. Sure, it's a somewhat expensive thing, but it could never surpass the value of a dog.
I could have so easily taken Trixie and punished her. And, unfortunatley, that is what many people would have done.

Thank goodness I stopped myself and thought about how much more she means to me. And not only her, but everyone else in my life. If it has a brain, feelings, and emotions, it is worth more to me than an object. Objects are far easier to come by than our relationships with others.
I know that Trixie had no idea what she was doing. How was she supposed to know what an ipod was? She probably just thought it was a really-hard, bad tasting, oddly shaped bone, right? :P. It was an accident. And what do we get out of making someone feel horrible because of an accident? We get nothing. So, why do it? Why go through all the trouble just to make someone feel terrible? They already know what they did was wrong.

I hope that we can all learn to stop and think of the real importance of a person and their feelings. There is absolutley no use in making a person feel bad for damaging the pristine nature of a truly worthless object.

Here is the video of "The Last Lecture" by Dr. Randy Pausch.