What a Spoodle Taught Me About the Second Arrow

A note to young leaders.

I share my home with a guru. Her name is Clover. She’s a spoodle.

She teaches me about the uncontainable, ridiculous joy of living, and about a thing the Buddhists sometimes speak of: the “second arrow.”

The first arrow is the one life fires at you – the setback, the loss, the diagnosis, the email that begins: “We regret to inform you.” Nobody dodges the first arrow. It arrives courtesy of fate and fortune – two archers with excellent aim and no discernible conscience.

But the second arrow is the one you fire at yourself: the worry, the guilt, the shame, the regret, the three a.m. replay of the meeting where you said the wrong thing to the right person.

The second arrow is deadlier than the first. The first arrow wounds you. The second, you twist with your own hands.

Young leaders are second-arrow specialists. I know, because I was one. You can lose a deal in an afternoon and then spend a fortnight losing it again nightly, in high definition, with director’s commentary. The original misfortune lasts an hour; the re-enactments run for a season.

Clover doesn’t do this.

When something goes wrong in her world, she suffers precisely once, and briefly, before being ambushed by the next available ecstasy: a lizard, a smell, the sound of the treat drawer easing open two rooms away. She bounces from excitement to excitement never pausing for analysis, and the result is unedited joy – no revisions, no regrets.

I concede that living like a dog full-time has its drawbacks. A chief executive who abandons a difficult board meeting to investigate a pigeon would eventually attract comment.

But nobody is asking you to resign your humanity – only to lease it out occasionally. For a few minutes. For the length of a walk.

So take the walk.

We ask our dogs to retrieve sticks and balls. In truth they are retrieving us – out of the yesterdays we’re sunk in and the tomorrows we’re lost in, back to the only place a second arrow can’t reach us: here, now.