We walk a regular set of paths everyday. One of our girls is reactive towards other dogs while on a leash. She’s a gentle girl, but suffers from a lot of anxiety, especially since we moved her away from her home in Germany. I’ve seen a similar response in my son. They were even the same chronological age. We moved him away and he simply fell out of sorts in the unfamiliar spaces in which he found himself.

So, we try to maintain a sense of predicability; but the winter is fast approaching and the hands of the clock have fallen back an hour – a disruptive tradition for our own inner regulation. Therefore, it is now dark and can feel disorienting to everyone. It even changes who we might encounter with every step and every corner turned.

Within this blanket of darkness, venturing our familiar steps in an unfamiliar period, I was left mostly blind to my surroundings. Only the light from the waning moon gave us an indication of the sidewalk that lay before us. My girls have an advantage in the dark, however, my gentle girl still seems to sense a vulnerability that leaves her just as anxious as before.

Despite how small our world of sight had become, we were not long into the walk before I noticed something unintended. It was a different perspective to the world I thought I knew, and one I suspect my dogs have already discovered, long before me. A strong smell of herbs and spices simmered in the air. It was a new dimension to the space we have occupied so many times before. It was followed by a fresh scent of pine, a tree I had never noticed on this street. We live in a mostly deciduous forest and the leaves are rapidly falling. Decay and something slightly pungent danced with the spices and pine now. In mere moments we had been enveloped in a cocoon of scents and memories. We reminisced on these boxed pasta meals we used to buy in our youth and the alpine forests we explored from Germany to California.

Then…something else. As we round the corner onto the next street, a blast of warm air hit us, and a few steps later a wistful breeze carrying a flurry of coolness swirled and collated until it erased the warmth. The flitting of warm and cold continued on this stretch, until we reached the next corner where, again, our noses were greeted with the smells of family dinners, earth, wet, decomposing leaves on the ground, and hints of pine. Onward and onward, our walk was a delightful immersive affair.

It was then that I realized how different my world is from my dogs and other beings who don’t share my same degree of sensing. I enjoy seeing the colors of the world as it changes, watching the squirrels prepare in their fussy little ways for the impending cold, and visually exploring the space around me. My vision collects one type of data and I catalogue it, dutifully. I assume that what I see is all there is to know and assign it greater importance. It isn’t as though I don’t also feel, smell, or hear when the world is lit up – I do. I simply don’t feel, smell, or hear with the same acuity. I can now understand how silly and arrogant my eyes have been. Our winter walks have opened a doorway into a new way of experiencing the same path at the same time each day.