My friend’s dog greets every single return — whether she’s been gone five minutes or five hours — with the same unbridled, full-body joy. The same tail. The same eyes. The same absolute conviction that this moment, right now, is the best moment.

Dogs are pure present tense. They don’t lie awake cataloguing the embarrassments of the week. They don’t dread next Tuesday. They don’t half-listen to you while scrolling through a version of someone else’s life. They are HERE, completely, without qualification, and they expect the same of you.

We call them simple. I think we mean it as a slight, but I’m no longer sure it is one.

They also love without auditing. Without asking whether you deserve it, whether you’ve earned it recently enough, whether it’s being reciprocated at the correct ratio. They love because you’re there, because you’re theirs, because love is apparently just what they do.

I’m not saying we should all become dogs. The capacity to plan ahead, to learn from the past, to imagine possible futures — these are extraordinary gifts. But like all gifts, they come with the risk of misuse. And the specific misuse we’re most prone to is living everywhere except the present moment.

Watch a dog for a while. Notice how completely they inhabit right now. Then try, even briefly, to do the same.