Layers.

All I want to do is stop writing. I want to do anything but write. I need to organize the things in my fridge so the labels face outward. That's more important than sitting down and typing nonsense about my dogs… right?

“Stop it!”

“Stop what?”

“Thinking it’s nonsense!”

“But it is! You have no idea what you’re doing. And who are you to think you have something worth sharing?”

“How many times do I have to tell you!? I don’t care what people think!”

“Yes you do, or I wouldn’t be in your head right now, laughing hysterically at you!”

“I’m not doing this for them. I’m doing this for me.”

Finally, a moment of silence. The negative voice in my head has no rebuttal.

I’ve learned a few tricks to stop the bickering in my head, but we’ll save those for another story. Today, what shut them up was a picture on my Alexa device. I noticed it while vacuuming for the third time.

Teaching Dirt to jump over obstacles proved more difficult than I anticipated. I started by teaching him to jump on or over everything we encountered. Picnic tables, bike racks, fallen trees, fire pits, busy highways, mountain ledges, the usual. But I kept running into the same problem. He never wanted to jump over – he wanted to go around.

Naturally, we go around our problems. We avoid them. We place them under the rug until we’ve created a big mound we trip over.

When teaching a dog a new trick, the first component is to break the trick into pieces. When it comes to layered dog tricks, and by “layered,” I mean one trick requiring the use of several others in order to perform correctly, they resemble a well-choreographed magic trick. Let’s use the “fetch me a beer from the fridge” trick as an example:

Teach fetch (get something and bring it back).

Teach the dog to hold an object in its mouth (eventually will be the beer can).

Teach the dog the verbal command of fetching (don’t say “go get it,” say “go fetch a beer” when you’re teaching the dog to fetch in the backyard).

Teach the dog the verbal command of holding an object (replace “hold” with “beer”).

Teach the dog to pull on an object (start by teaching the dog to play tug, except you’ll want to use the same thing you plan on wrapping around the refrigerator door handle).

Place the object in the same spot in the fridge (this is for the dog to know exactly where to look. It Needs to be in the same spot and the same type of beer i.e., glass vs can etc.…).

The dog brings you the beer (ending the fetch game).

Not so hard, right? Don’t count on it working, though. This ain’t a dog training story, but you get the point.

I used the same model when I taught Dirt to jump over stuff. I started by placing a piece of wood on the ground and saying “over” every time he crossed the piece of wood, then giving him a treat. I added another piece of wood and did the same. Then another. And another. After twenty minutes, he was bored and ready to learn something else.

The human brain is complex. It often complicates tasks. It’s easier to make something complex than to make it simple. All I need to do is sit down and write. But like clockwork, I fight to avoid it.

This is the inevitable roadblock I knew was coming and wanted to hit. Now it’s time to figure out how to get around it. So I’ll give you one guess as to how I plan on doing that…

That’s right! A fifteen-minute hourglass timer! Five minutes is not quite long enough to get started, yet an hour is overwhelming. So I’ve started writing in fifteen-minute pieces, and it seems to work. And like magic, the fifteen minutes lead to an hour, then two hours, then three. Almost like pieces. Or shall we say, layers?