The Dog Walks and the Laughter

I expected the big things to tell me whether changing our orbit was working.

The resignation. The RV. The travel plans. The financial decisions. The things that look significant enough to mark a life transition.

Instead, one of the clearest signals has been walking the dogs.

We walk King and Pele every morning and every evening now.

That sounds almost too ordinary to matter. But while we were living in the apartment, even something that simple became frustrating. Our routines were compressed. The dogs felt it. We felt it. There was always another demand occupying the space.

The new routine is different.

We walk. We talk. We joke with each other. We make fun of ridiculous things. We laugh.

And the laughter is the part I keep coming back to.

“We kid each other. We joke with each other. We have fun.”

That is not a scorecard I would have put on retirement.

But maybe it should have been.

The idea behind Changing Orbit is that the old gravity of a life can keep pulling long after you stop asking whether it still deserves that much force. Careers, schedules, obligations and outside urgency had a strong pull on both of us for a long time.

We are not trying to eliminate responsibility.

We are trying to change what gets the strongest pull.

Right now, some of the evidence is very small: two dogs who get walked twice a day, conversations that are not squeezed between obligations, more laughter, and a little less noise from outside our relationship.

That does not prove we have figured anything out.

But it does tell me that something has changed.