size matters

Every dog needs their place. SO when I first got esme I went out and procured for her a dog bed. An enormous dog bed. Really. I got it used off craiglist and the guy I bought it from told me his TWO german shephards slept on it together. Big fucking dog bed. And she loved it. It was her little mountain of home. And I let her have her pile of toys and bones and nasty pieces of who knows what on this dog bed. It was hers. Her bed.

And then recently I began to wonder: does esme really need a dog bed the size of 4 normal dog beds? I was torn, because she loved that bed, but frankly, she sleeps with us half the time anyway and she's not exactly a large dog. So I hauled my ass to Target and bought her a bed, still big enough for a dog twice her size, but half the size she was accustomed to, tossed it down.

Well, she looked at it, and then she hopped up and down on top of it in her weird deer like way and then she licked me to thank me and so forth and then ran to her old bed and fell upon it.

Crap.

And my friend standing next to me turned and said "lets just get rid of the old bed and see what happens"

And now esme resides on a bed 1/4 the size of the old one just as happily.
Actually, thats a lie, currently she is on the couch, on my legs, satiated, and as often as not still at the foot of our bed, but she seems to have accepted the new bed without much transition, otherwise...

My point?
We get spoiled. Gluttony. We always think we need more than we do. We...you know...get used to open plains and fields of gold and wine as water. Unnecessary freedoms. Life without bounds. We ARE spoiled.

I mean, to be clear, I did not buy a potato and ask esme to accept that as a dog bed. I simply bought a big ass pillow smaller than her last big ass pillow and said "hey, how about a perspective adjustment". And it worked.

I am not arguing that all you need is a swiss army knife and a heart of gold to make it in this big bad world.

But sometimes I angle to build by dog palace of gold to make her happy when she only needed a glorified pillow from target and my lap to make her comfortable. There is, no doubt, an object lesson in this.