Ham it up!

This morning, I was busy packing lunch for my daughter when I noticed my 17 year-old Chihuahua staring up at me with sad little eyes. He knows this is the time I usually give him a piece of ham, which serves as a delicious vessel for the medicine that eases his aching little body. As much as I love that little guy, he sure doesn’t make it easy for me. I have to be very strategic about how I wrap his pills, or he will spit them out; at the same time aggravating me with his stubbornness.

The first pill went down, no problem. I waited anxiously as he took the second pill, chewed twice, and spit it out. “Fine! Be in pain!!” I shouted as I secretly knew I didn’t want him to be in pain. That dog is so stupid; he doesn’t know what’s good for him, I thought to myself.

I continued prepping my daughter’s lunch and forgot about the uneaten ham on the kitchen floor, maybe hoping he would come back and eat it. Back and forth to the fridge I went, grabbing this and that, selecting ingredients for my breakfast smoothie, when all of a sudden, I skidded across the floor, flailing my arms like a maniac out of control. Really, you should have seen it. I felt like Bambi when she tried to walk on ice. “What the heck??” I wondered as I looked around for the culprit for my acrobatics. My eyes glanced to the floor and instantly saw a smeared piece of ham….the very ham I chastised my dog for not eating. And I had to laugh.

I could have had a different reaction. I could have been angry at the dog for not eating the ham. I could have been angry at myself for not picking up the leftover ham. Instead, I thought, how often do we have things that are good for us right under our noses, but we continue to ignore them? We think they’ll go away. We think they are insignificant, yet when they are unattended, when they are ignored, they can cause us a great deal of harm. They may come disguised in a package we don’t like, but we should be open to the thought that what on the surface doesn’t seem appealing, underneath that is actually something that can make us better. Lessons are all around us. We just have to look for them. I found this lesson in a little piece of ham. And I had to laugh.