A Bonny Life

Bonny update:

It is now the 6th day of life with Bonny and as Michael Buble is currently singing: 'I'm feeling good'! She recovered very quickly from her bad tummy and is now eating and drinking (and pooing) fine!

She is a complete joy. She is so bright and completely unafraid of anything. She has so far met swans, Boxer dogs and people and hasn't turned a hair. I have started the engine briefly on the boat as I thought the noise and vibration might be a bit of a fright for her - no, she cocked her head for a bit and then carried on playing. She came to work with me on the weekend and I was rather worried, especially for the Sunday when the boss was in, but I needn't have fretted. She bounced about the shop while there was no one around and when I needed to shut her in her crate, she promptly fell asleep. She has charmed my co-worker - so much so, that he looked after her yesterday when I needed to go out! The shop is quickly becoming a second home to her. Last night we managed our first uninterrupted night's sleep - thank goodness! House training, or should I say boat training is going to take a while, but she is already confining herself to two patches of newspaper at either end of the boat.

Fearlessness:

It made me think again about fear; is it natural and inborn or is it learnt? My other two dogs were both rescue adults and had already a whole set of fears each. But Bonny has been loved and safe from birth. Since nothing has yet hurt her, she doesn't seem to feel fear. Will she continue to be unafraid? What if then something happens to her (like falling in the cut!) will she then be fearful of other things? Once a creature has known fear, can it go back to being unafraid?

And what about us human beings? Can we choose to put aside old fears and decide to live unafraid lives? People will say that a certain amount of fear is good; it helps in our survival, but I wonder? I don't have to be afraid of standing on a railway line as a train approaches to know it's dangerous. Now I am an adult I know what will hurt me and what won't, so is it possible to live without fear?

Think of the freedom we would enjoy if it were so. No fears for the future, no fear of death, no fear of rejection, of strangers, of crime or of illness. Yes, we will suffer some or all of these things but the suffering will be limited to the time of it's arrival; we would no longer be suffering in advance of any struggle. After all, most of us waste vast amounts of useless emotion on 'what if's'; on fear of things that don't actually come to pass.

Another question - if we lost all fear, would that turn us into 'bad' people? 'Fear of The Lord', the Bible says 'is the beginning of wisdom'. If we no longer feared God or feared punishment for our sins, would we then sin more? I'm not so sure. After all, we may be afraid of punishment as we are now, but it still doesn't stop us doing things wrong, so not having fear probably wouldn't make that much difference to our level of 'badness'. Of course what we wouldn't any longer be able to do is frighten people into faith. No more - believe what I believe or be damned / rejected by God / cast out of our community etc etc. No more 'turn or burn'!

So what would we look like without fear? How would we live differently, believe differently? What would happen to our society if we could look strangers in the eye and be unafraid. How would the government govern without being able to use fear to manipulate us. What sort of people of faith would we be if we followed our God out of love and a lust for life, rather than fear of the alternative? Would we treat our planet and the poorest on it any better if we did not fear that someone else might be getting a bigger slice of the cake than we have? What would happen if instead of living safely by avoiding what frightens us, we threw ourselves into life, sucking the marrow out of it and valuing it as the miraculous gift it is?

One downside I can immediately think of - those two fear masters, Health and Safety, might be out of a job!