I have very fond memories of my grandmother, but she had one strange taste: an inordinate love of taxidermy. Her house was infested with a menagerie of stuffed animals. From the menacing buffalo head that greeted me at the door, to the glassy-eyed kudu bull who guarded the staircase, to the yellow-billed kite keeping watch over me while I played with trains. It was a pretty freaky and intimidating place to spend a weekend, and goes a long way to explain my latent agoraphobia that favors hotels over the outdoors.
But the most terrifying trophies were the leopard and lion skin rugs. My dear grandma made no effort to allay my fears that these creatures were able to maul me if I got too close.
Thankfully, none of this scarred my psyche; I still wanted to own a dog. My first puppy was a pavement special, a mutt of note. Ugly, scrawny, and dumb as dumbbell, but I’d still choose that mongrel any day of the week over a stuffed leopard, lion, or anything.
Everyone understands that a living poodle is better than a dead lion. (Of course a dead poodle is not a bad idea either). King Solomon offers us this eccentric serving of sideways wisdom in Ecclesiastes 9: 4But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. 5 For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. 6 Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun.
Perhaps you are currently languishing in a melancholic mid-life limbo; the long, dark, tea time of the soul. Your life feels underwhelming. Perhaps your career never crept off the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. Maybe you expected that your bank account would be bulging more than what your waistline is. Perhaps you anticipated more children or fewer marriages in your life. And now your rose-colored bifocals have slipped, only to reveal the hindsight of your life as it really is—nauseatingly mediocre.
This unvarnished specter chimes a dissonance in the soul, which we often dismiss as a mid-life crisis. Buy a convertible, get some hair-implants, join a gym; you’ll soon feel better. But if you were on Solomon’s couch, he’d lob this injunction at your depression: “You are sad because you are perceptive. If my life was as pathetic as yours I’d be melancholic too. But at least you’re not a stuffed lion.”
Source: When a Poodle Beats a Lion
