Aladdin, Rusty and What Doesn't Disappoint

Aladdin did it in Jacksonville, Florida. This is not your rubbing lamps Aladdin and his three wishes but a greyhound. He caught the mechanical rabbit at the dog track.

I used to live in Chingford, slightly north of Walthamstow. I cut my teaching teeth in a couple of challenging high schools there. I said, after a particularly difficult probationary year, that I would give teaching four years and if I still wasn’t enjoying it, I would find something else to do instead. Four years of training seemed to demand four years of putting back into the system what I had been given in terms of grants. I never did try anything else.

I rented a room in a house that backed on to the Walthamstow Dog Stadium. The dog track closed in 2008 but I lived in the area in the early 1980s. I went once or twice, as you do, living almost next door to it. I didn’t know what I was doing most of the time. Lucky fifteen horse racing bets came with married life and a husband that knew his way round a betting shop. Then, it was just a name and a number and a very small wager. The dogs whipped around the curve of the racetrack in the blink of an eye. And the rabbit, a mechanical thing always called Rusty, whipped just ahead. Apparently, the dogs run faster than the rabbit, so it gets a head start. They end the race closer to Rusty than when they started. But did they ever catch the rabbit?

“Aladdin,” a greyhound that raced at the Jacksonville Dogtrack in Jacksonville, Florida, did. The newspaper article tells of his utter disappointment when he caught it. He had been fooled for years into thinking it was a real rabbit and it turned out not to be.

I was thinking of dog tracks simply because the speaker at church mentioned them in passing. The context was about chasing after things and not giving up.

I got to thinking about the whole chasing after thing. How many times does a greyhound chase after Rusty and, after not catching him for years, down-paws and concludes it isn’t worth the effort. There is an age and fitness thing obviously, but what about the young, fit ones and the realization that they’re never going to catch the rabbit so why bother running? But what if they catch Rusty? What then? Do they lose motivation once they have caught the rabbit. They never race again. Disappointment at being duped hits them hard.

There have been times in my life when I thought if only I had this or that, I would be so much happier. My life would be that much better. Ergonomic pillows come to mind. Made with memory foam. It was probably some Facebook advertisement. A sleep aid, a special pillow that aligns the neck and the spine and you get a good sleep. Now, don’t get me wrong here, for some people it does solve the problem and they do get a better night’s sleep. Sleep and I are not that comfortable with each other. I bought the pillows, two of them, one for me and one for my husband. He chucked his pillow out of the bed swiftly. I figured that I had spent the money and I was going to make it work. That lasted a week. The pillow was forever stuck in a previous memory as I turned over and over before I fell asleep. It was not working. These pillows that I had yearned for, like the rabbit the greyhounds were chasing once caught were not all that I wanted. I hadn’t been duped. They just didn’t work for me. I sold them off in a car boot sale later.

If we were to list the things we have chased after only to find ourselves dissatisfied it would be a long list.

Harvard Business Review cuts the list down to three things. Take a guess before you read on.

Money tops the list. Money experts say that somewhere between £100,000 to £120,000 is enough and anything more than that doesn’t make you any happier. It might make you more miserly and less generous as we adopt that mindset that if we did it, so could anyone else. And it’s a matter of hard work.

The approval of others comes in second. Ouch! I have jumped through too many hoops over the years to try to join the cool gang. I was ever only an outsider not matter how hard I tried. I wasn’t tall enough, slim enough, colour-coordinated enough or just simply enough. I wasn’t happy in my skin and maybe that was a contributing factor. I wasn’t confident and people like confident people. I am glad to say that I have grown out of that phase of life. Like me, don’t like me – just don’t throw an egg at my window.

Here’s a poem from a long time back. Vincent here is Archbishop Vincent Nichols, warning that social networking websites, texting and e-mails were undermining community life in 2008 -

Vincent Says

Vincent questions my friendships

All seven hundred and one of them

He calls them transient and

Accuses me of trading quantity for quality

I collect friends, he says, like he once collected butterflies

He knew his butterflies, Latin names and markings

He asks me what I know of my friends

What names and what markings are real?

Friendship should be hard work

It doesn’t come with the push of a button

Or posting trite life mantras

And plundering the keyboard for punctuation marks

Vincent finds fault with a community that “chats”

Without reading a person’s mood

Or deciphering their body language

They swap typeface for flesh face

Communities, he says, should be well rounded

Touch and smell, taste, sound and sight

Imparted in equal measure to

Those who live beyond the Facebook family

And when my fragile friendships break – what then?

He points me to a better Friend

Who will carry me on His shoulders

And with His finger brush away my tears

Stuff comes in at number three – the ergonomic pillows. Just let me live in the right neighbourhood, drive the right car and have a tail-wagging dog and I will be happy. I am persuaded by the advertising world that it’s not just the right kind of shampoo I should be using, or what liquid I’m using in the dishwasher – but the context of it all, the immaculately tidy bathroom or kitchen. I can’t live up to that image. And, do I really want to?

There are better things to chase after. – things that enrich our friendships, touch others with our generosity and allow us to find wonder in the world

I like to think that Aladdin went on to live a full and meaningful life after he was done with chasing Rusty.