Past Regrets??

I've played around with this blog theme only briefly in my head on a couple occasions.  A topic was suggested for group blog day and I'm taking a stab at it.  Please visit  http://dog-agility-blog-events.posterous.com/pages/2012-march-if-i-knew-then-what-i-know-now to see more views on the subject.

My first spin on "If I knew then what I know now" was pondering how much more of a "team" my dogs and I could have been had we done x, y and z foundation work/conditioning work/trick work.  Perhaps I could have had a World Champion on my hands by now!  My dogs would run tricky international courses with their eyes closed and we'd be smooth as silk performing the ugliest of threadles into 270s to crazy-hard backside pushes.

After mulling that over, I thought okay, that is all well and good to have the benefit of hindsight, but realistically, it doesn't matter what I knew then, because I didn't know it then...

Isn't that what growing and evolving is all about?  Many of us start off knowing nothing and doing everything the hard way.  There is beauty in that though.  The old saying is that anything worth having in life is worth working for.  When I was 14 years old I began working at the Country Kitchen as a dishwasher.  It was an incredibly retched, putrid, disgusting job and I got sick just thinking about going in for my shift.  But, I worked my butt off for some precious spending cash which for me, translated into CDs (they were brand new then!), gas money, insurance money which then equated to some really priceless memories in my teenage years.  Had I been born in a different situation where I didn't need to earn money to have the privilege of driving and buying my precious music, maybe I wouldn't have cared so much about that stuff and would have taken it for granted.  You can see where I am going with this comparison. 

Arguably, I did a lot of things "wrong" with Drina, my first agility dog that I began training in 2000.  In fact, I may have done everything "wrong" with what we now consider to be basics of dog training.  Foundation?  What is that?  We just jumped right in with obstacle training!  Contact criteria?  What is that?  We just ran and hoped for the best!  Circle work/shadow handling/working on the flat?  Huh!?!?  Drina and I spent years battling problems that could have been addressed by some basic concepts that we know about now.  Our first experiences in Novice were absolute torture.  I was beyond frustrated and my dog was beyond stressed.  Besides not knowing anything, I was a very different person than I am today.  I was actually shy (probably no one would believe that now) and introverted and I was mortified when my instructors wanted to me excitedly praise my dog.  I didn't want to look silly and cause a scene!  It makes me laugh now how reluctant I was to make a fool of myself since now it doesn't even cross my mind that anyone might think twice about how I look when I'm training my dog.  I'm now a loud dog trainer (and proud of it!).

But, as awful as our early days were, I wouldn't change a thing.  If I had started off doing all the right things and practicing perfect foundation, maybe I wouldn't be the trainer I am today.  I might not appreciate that MACH title that Drina and I received out of the Novice A class as much perhaps.  Maybe I wouldn't have gotten to experience the exhiliration I felt when Drina did weaves in Excellent the first time in nearly two years.  Going to Nationals with her and having her run all rounds clean might not have held the same magic as it did.  Had I trained contacts properly with Brag I might not have the drive to do them better now.  If I would have recognized Dare's reactivity and motion sensitivity when she was a young dog and done all the right things I wouldn't have had the triumphs of working through those things in an older dog and the knowledge to recognize them in my puppy.  In my mind I'm doing a good job of covering all the necessities with Swift's early training but I'm sure 5 years down the road I could make a long list of everything "I wish I knew then." 

I ran across a quote that really said it all for me.  "What's Past is Prologue."  It is from Shakespeare's The Tempest and I really like one interpretation I've seen that says what's happened in the past merely sets the scene for the really important stuff.  To me, that means the past has shaped me to be who I am now but also in my mind, it says that today is the important day.  Not yesterday or tomorrow, but today.  One of my biggest goals is to focus on the journey (today) rather than lamenting the past (yesterday) or blindly scrambling to the destination (tomorrow).  If I obsess over the things that I didn't do, or didn't do correctly, or only drive to my goal, I'll miss all the magic happening in the here and now.  This goal can have so many applications for my life and dog training specifically.  From things as simple as trying not to burden yourself with a "timeline" of when your puppy should be doing this that and the other thing to not letting yourself go so crazy trying to get a title or some such achievement that you don't enjoy the runs with your dog.  I've done those things and learned it isn't worth it. 

So, in closing, I guess I'd conclude that "if I knew then what I know now", I wouldn't change anything for the world.