Walking Wisdom

by Gotham Chopra

“I want strawberry milk,” little Krishu piled on, always echoing his older sister, whom he worships.

  Mallika glanced at Candice, who shrugged her approval.

  “I can make more saag curry,” my sister’s husband kindly offered, noticing the somber tone around the table. He’s the undisputed top chef in the family. Like in most Asian clans, good food is the way we navigate through life’s ups and downs. But not tonight. Our appetites were clearly off.

  “No thanks.” My mom got up from the table. “I’m going to call India again and check in.”

  Later, after the kids had gone to sleep and my father drifted outside on a phone call, my mother drew Mallika and me together again. “Your father will be fine. He’s used to being alone. But this time, just stay in touch.”

  Ironic really, considering that on a normal day we’re in touch close to half a dozen times.

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  We did know what she meant. With my mom having to hustle into action and get onto a plane with no real preparation and no definite plan to be back anytime soon, the fact was that my father was going to have to recalibrate considerably. He’s quite adept at fending for himself, considering the amount of time he travels, speaking, teaching, and promoting his books. Less his physical whereabouts and movements, it was more his emotional anchoring my mother had in mind.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom,” Mallika advised her. “Just go take care of Nana.”

  My mom’s eyes welled up again with tears. She nodded and then reached into her bag and pulled out a shoe box with a Nike swoosh plastered across its top. She lifted the lid to reveal a shining new pair of K-Swiss sneakers in my size. She handed them over to me.

  “Go run around in these.”

  Chapter Two

  Father or grandfather? Which is your favorite role?

  I think my favorite role is grandfather. When I was a father, I was so busy and so unaware that your mom had to take care of everything. But now, even though she still takes care of everything, I have more time to play. Or I should say, more inclination to play.

  Wait—you’re still a father!

  Yeah, but my playful role comes from being a grandfather.

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON. CANDICE WAS PUTTING KRISHU down for a nap, a weekend ritual that usually culminated in their both taking an afternoon slumber, while Cleo and I kicked back on the couch to take in whatever game we could find on television. Today though, I felt an awkward pressure to socialize with my father.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Wikipedia,” he said as he hunched over his computer, not taking his eyes off the screen. My father loves Wikipedia and Google. I mean serious infatuation. Keep that in mind as you read his next best seller. A vast wellspring of wisdom and knowledge, he is profoundly influenced by the two broadest information sources online.

  “What are you reading about?” I pressed on.

  “Happiness,” he answered, clearly not feeling the same obligation I did.

  “What about it?” I egged him on.

  “Like all emotions, happiness creates a biological response. It triggers the release of specific chemicals in the brain in the perfect dosage, better than any pharmacy ever could. Fascinating.”

  Not really, I thought.

  He sensed my dissatisfaction. “All animals including us create our own biologies. We dictate the quality and longevity of the life we live. Whether you have high counts of serotonin, an antidepressant drug, or cortisone, an anti-inflammatory, coursing through your body determines everything—how you feel about yourself, your work, your relationships, your life. If you can self-regulate those chemicals in your body without the aid of any drugs, then you control fully the quality of your life.”

  “Interesting.” I decided to be the aloof one this time.

  Surveying the situation and sensing that this was where we were hanging for the next few hours, Cleo moved toward my father, slid beneath his feet, did a few circles, and set down into a comfortable heap. He eyed her suspiciously.

  “Don’t mind her,” I said. “She just wants to hang out near you.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Because that’s what makes her happy, I guess.” Take that, Wikipedia.

  “How old is Krishu?” my father inquired, taking his eyes off Cleo.

  This is a unique quality of my father’s. He’s taken the idea of time just being a concept to a whole new level. Recently someone asked him how old I was. He eyed me like a technician surveys a lab rat in a cage and answered confidently, “Twenty-five.” Being that I am thirty-four and his son, I’m not quite sure how to rationalize that one, except that maybe shorting me by a decade or so somehow made him feel younger. With Krishu, there is not that much time to play with. He’s been with us for just short of two years. Though he appears to have laid out a hefty down payment on his terrible twos, at that moment he was pushing just about twenty months.

  “Almost two,” I answered my father. “Why?”

  “We still have time,” he said, sounding more and more like a mad scientist. “By the age of two, most children’s brains are almost fully formed. By the age of four, their responses to various stimulae are so rigid, they can’t be changed. By the age of eight, their neural pathways are so defined, their behavior patterns so fixed, there’s hardly any point anymore.”

  He looked up at me. “Did you know that most leaders in the world—almost all men, incidentally—have the psychology and biological responses of eight-year-old boys? Threaten them and they threaten you back louder. Hit them and they hit you back harder. In that way, they are no different than little boys or dogs.”

  I furrowed my brow at him. Likewise at the mention of the word dog, Cleo perked. Where was he taking this?

  Don’t get me wrong. Similar sentiments had been plaguing me in recent months as I had seen Krishu’s transition from an infant who relied solely on his mother for survival to an actual human being whose mind was in constant and rapid expansion. For the first eighteen months of his life, I had concluded that I was of little more value than a utility player is on a championship baseball team: I got the occasional pat on the back for surprisingly adding value, but those same folks would hardly notice if I were replaced by another body. The true participants in Krishu’s evolution had been a gaggle of women: Candice, her mom, my mom, various “lactation consultants,” and other moms with shared experiences. Let’s not forget the online mommy tutors.

  But then, around the eighteen-month mark, all of a sudden that baby started to become a kid. I, for one, found it intimidating and was still feeling the burden of it as I sat there with my father, sensing that he was preparing to start his experiments on my progeny. Candice had spent her full nine months of incubation reading every child development book known to man, and then reread them all when Krishu arrived, seemingly turning herself into a Jedi master of motherhood. But I had faltered, relying on the notion that some primal paternal instinct would kick in and navigate me through the maze of parenthood.

  Whoops.

  Now I eyed my father the same way that he eyed Cleo. Could he really be relied upon to offer me the wisdom I craved? I turned out okay, I thought to myself. Didn’t I?

  At that moment, Candice and Krishu pushed through the door into the living room. Krishu had a huge smile on his face and his mama looked weary. “He’s not going down for a nap today. Too much excitement with Dada here.”

  On cue, Krishu sprinted across the room toward my father. “Dada!” he sang, plunging into my father’s legs just as Cleo narrowly avoided his uncoordinated rush.

  I might still be feeling out this father thing; nevertheless, I had adapted to the husband thing fairly well over the last seven years. Looking at Candice and sensing her fatigue, I turned back to my father and Krishu and grabbed Cleo’s leash from the wall. “Why don’t we all go for a walk?”

  Krishu had just discovered the functionality of his legs in the last few months and the glorious act of walking th
at goes with it. Just strolling around our suburban Californian block is a real adventure for him. What should take about five minutes often turns into a twenty-five-minute odyssey so that he can reposition the white rocks that groom a neighbor’s garden, smell the lemons hanging off the branches in another yard, point out the colors of cars that line the streets, and the crowning moment of every stroll—play fetch with Riley, the golden retriever who sits devotedly in front of her house waiting for whoever may pass.

  I am reminded on these daily walks that neither of the two dogs I’ve had in my life—Nicholas nor Cleo—has ever mastered the game of fetch. I’m not sure if that’s more a reflection on them or on my family’s inability to teach the most simple and common game between a dog and its owner. Riley, on the other hand, is an expert fetcher. A handful of bald tennis balls always surrounds her. Using her snout she’ll push them beneath her white picket fence, hoping to prompt a game of fetch with anyone who happens to walk by. Krishu, of course, is always game.

  When I brought this up with my father—our dogs’ historic inability to play fetch—he frowned and replied: “Training any animal, be it a dog or a human, to react in a Pavlovian manner, to grunt, pant, or drool on demand, is no great achievement.”

  “It’s kind of a nice tradition,” I offered, recalling all of the beer commercials I’d seen in which men and their dogs joyfully played fetch. Admittedly, I struggled to see Papa cast in that role.

  Papa countered: “In fact, one of the greatest attributes that dogs have is their ability to just be without worrying about repercussions. That’s a quality that should be nurtured in them.”

  Leave it to Papa to be the contrarian. Without even trying, I had rubbed him the wrong way. He started up again as we rounded the corner and ambled toward Riley’s house. Krishu ran up excitedly a few feet ahead, anticipating the game.

  “It’s one of the significant problems we have in our society. We demand conformity, that people react how we want them to, meet our rigid expectations of them. As a result, they do. The average human has ninety thousand thoughts every day. Do you know that the vast majority of them are the same thoughts they had the day before?”

  In fact, I did know that. Not because I’m some sort of behavioral scientist, but because I’ve been around my father enough to know that he often relies on the same statistics and examples to emphasize his theories. Ironic really, considering the point he was trying to make. I chose not to highlight this back to him.

  He continued: “How often do leaders around the world react with anything other than absolute predictability? Agitate them and they react with suspicion, defensiveness, and hostility. It’s the history of the planet and leads to greater distrust, confrontation, and war. I’d say that many of the leaders you see around the world—from presidents to prime ministers, dictators and demigods—are not that much more sophisticated than a dog playing fetch. Throw the ball, and get the expected result. The only problem now is that along with these ancient habits, we have modern technologies.”

  He huffed and shook his head. For the last few years, contrary to his reputation as a New Age savant in pursuit of answers to only existential angst, my father’s main focus has been on global issues of war, social injustice, and the decaying ecology. Truth be told, he spends more time these days contemplating conflict resolution than karma, terrorism than timelessness. As he’s entered what he so ominously calls the “twilight of his life,” he’s become obsessed with fixing the planet’s physiology and biology, rather than healing its soul. As there is a lot of work to be done in that regard, I often find him frustrated and even despondent over something he’s seen in the news. His greatest disappointment is with the lack of leadership around the world. It’s a recurring theme with him.

  “Give the leader of a toppled state a little authority and what does he demand? More. Rebuild the military or economy of a budding nation and what do they want? To become a superpower.”

  Papa shook his head ruefully. “Most so-called leaders around the world are petty tyrants, operating from the consciousness of preadolescent boys, without the ability to think outside of their own limited instinctive rigid needs.”

  It was no surprise to me that my father could relegate the neighbor’s dog to the same corrupt and sad-sounding group of the world’s worst leaders. Still, I felt bad for bringing it up, especially at the precise moment that we came upon Riley’s white picket fence. Seeing her friend, Riley quickly retrieved as many tennis balls as she could fit in her mouth (amazingly, three) and dropped them at little Krishu’s feet. It was almost as if I had staged the whole thing. A wide grin spread across Krishu’s face as he picked up the first saliva-slicked ball, reeled his shoulder back, and thrust the ball forward. The moment it left his hand, Riley lunged and charged off, plowing through dirt and leaves to catch the ball before it had even rolled but ten or fifteen feet. Racing back with it clenched in her mouth, panting and drooling, she dropped the ball again at Krishu’s feet ready to do it all over again.

  As he always does, Krishu reacted with great delight, clapping his hands, almost dancing in place, and laughing loudly. He glanced at both my father and me with his enveloping smile.

  “Dada, do it,” Krishu ordered. Papa did a double take, looking from Krishu to me and down at the soaked tennis ball. Well aware that a moment before he had likened the game of fetch to the decay of human civilization, he was clearly unsure how to react.

  “Dada, do it!!!” Krishu pleaded, his glee poised to take a dramatic turn.

  “I’d do it if I were you,” I urged my father. I knew how this could turn out.

  Papa bent down, plastered a fake smile on his face, and threw the sopping ball a considerable ways farther than Krishu had. Riley was up for it and charged hard through the garden again, catching the ball before it came to a stop. Spinning around on her hind legs, Riley once again rushed back to us with the ball in her mouth.

  “Wow!” Krishu stared at his dada in wide-eyed awe. “Dada throw fetch far!!!” At that moment, Krishu’s admiration for his grandfather knew no bounds. Sensing this, Dada’s smile transformed and was authentic for the first time all day. He needed no prompting now, reaching down to clutch the ball and hurling it even farther this time for Riley to dutifully chase after.

  More elation for Krishu. More thrill for Dada. More fetch for Riley. We stood there for ten minutes while Dada impressed Krishu with his arm until, ironically, it was me—Krishu’s papa—who had to inform my papa that we had to stop the game and get home.

  “But what about Krishu?” Papa asked, concerned.

  “Tell him we’ll come back tomorrow and play again,” I said. “He’ll understand.”

  Hesitantly Papa complied. Initially disappointed, Krishu indeed understood. He knew this routine pretty well. Soon he was running up to the next neighbor’s house, where their five-year-old’s Tonka trucks were waiting on their doorstep to be admired.

  “So,” I asked my father, “still so down on fetch?”

  He smiled back at me. “I suppose I was wrong.” A rare admission, I can tell you. He thought for a moment. “What we just witnessed is playfulness and innocence at its best—from both Krishu and Riley.”

  “And you, I might add.”

  “And me.” He nodded. “Play behavior in all animals, notably dogs, is a sign of well-being. There is no fear, anger, or sadness in a state of play.” He gained momentum. “In the brain, play induces a sensation of pure joy, which in turn produces powerful hormones and chemicals that can have a profound and healthy effect on the body.” Papa reminded me that this was all research he’d done years ago while a practicing endocrinologist. (Eat that, Wikipedia!)

  “Neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and naturally induced opiates are antidepressants. They increase self-esteem, happiness, and pleasure—there is a veritable pharmacy organically occurring in your body that makes you healthy if triggered appropriately.”

  Enter his sweet spot: “All mammals, including huma
ns, are born with a sense of play, but ours tends to fade as we mature into adulthood and take on the burdens of work and responsibility. We’d all be better off if we never stopped playing with ourselves.”

  Should I? Really, should I? We were having an adult conversation and I knew I should hold the line. I did.

  It’s true: Dogs innately understand not just the desire for play, but also the need for it. Riley will bring you a ball and lay it at your feet to instigate a game of fetch, or she may send the message more assertively by dropping the ball directly in your hand and then nudging it with her nose. It is beneficial to both your well-being and the dog’s—and most certainly Krishu’s—to oblige.

  Cleo may not be so good at fetch, but she is the ultimate adventurer. No walk around the block with her is complete without at least one hundred stops along the way. A sniff here, a lick there, or her yanking her leash in an attempt to get off the sidewalk when she’s spied something that intrigues her.

  Now that my dad was in the mood, he noted this. “Curiosity itself is a great example of playfulness and what a profound effect it can have, even physiologically. Cleo’s act of sniffing things is not just the embodiment of her curiosity, but it also actually stimulates the pleasure center inside her brain.” Cue the oxytocin.

  Instinctively I gave Cleo’s leash a little more slack. Papa continued: “There’s a lot of research that suggests that humans who expose themselves to new things throughout their lives have higher concentrations of the chemicals and hormones I listed, and tend to live more fulfilling and even longer lives.”

  If you have a dog, then you already understand the vital need for touch for their emotional well-being. It is not an accident that you show your love for your dog by petting her. Her desire to be touched is even stronger than your desire to bury your hands in her warm fur. The head pats and ear scratches are essential to dogs. At the same time, petting a dog creates a sense of calm in people. The difference is that most people are not necessarily conscious of the pleasure they are experiencing, while dogs most certainly are. Ever notice how a dog will at times forcefully shove its head beneath a human hand, seeking touch?