Puppies don’t know a thing about advanced physics. All they know is everything’s exactly the way it is and always has been.

My two older dogs are rescues, meaning they both came from prior lives. Sheba must have been staked out in a yard because she distrusts people and came to us riddled with worms. Cody had 6 months without us, but was raised by cats so he’s a bit of a wimp. Abby, however, spent her first two months in the lap of luxury, sleeping in people beds and looking all adorable. She’s then moved to a home with two other dogs, a back yard, a walk every day, and a kid to play with. She’s a bit entitled to say the least. It’s not terribly surprising, though. Why should she think anything’s unusual if her experience has only ever been this? My son isn’t much different. Unlike me his childhood came with options never dreamt of in mine. As an adult I get why that is, but his experience, like the puppy’s, is a bit skewed.

It’s hard to imagine a life outside our own head, where we’re the star of the show and everything is happening to us. Getting out of one’s own head is critical to better understanding other people and the situations they endure. Dogs can’t empathize too deeply because it’s hard for them to understand the complex nature of human pain. Hell we don’t even understand it to the fullest and yet despite the depth of human pain, dogs have it only slightly better. Dogs were bred to be with humans; if we ever destroy ourselves we’ll be taking the dogs with us. Oh they’ll survive without people, but they won’t be as happy until that human marker is gone from their DNA. They’ll always wonder where that missing part has gone.

Perhaps in some parallel universe humans did just that, wipe themselves out leaving doggies to roam the earth without any people to love. They have doggie empires with cat jesters and squirrels get released for afternoon hunts. But when the day is done there’s no voice calling them home, no hand to scratch their ear, not bellys will be rubbed. Too sad to contemplate.

Parallel worlds allow us to spin scenarios like that and try on different outcomes. It’s a favorite trope of mine, extending its reach even into the fiction I write. It allows me to explore deeper topics through the eyes of fictional people living in these scenarios.

What happens to the janitor who crawls out of the rubble of the building after the action hero escapes? Superman sets the plane on the ground and salutes the passengers, flying off. Sure you post it to Instagram but what do you do when the real breakdown begins?

What happens to the daughter of the woman eaten by the lizard alien? What happens after the ambulances are gone and the camera crews retreat to their editing vans? She gets dropped off by the police to her apartment with a blanket around her shoulders. Well, they probably take the blanket back; gotta watch the budget. But the car drives off and she stands there shivering in the night air.

I’ll tell you what happens to these people. They lose their shit, that’s what happens.

How do you process the horrific nature of war and death? The fact you’re able to process it at all means you survived. We’d be a wreck if we fell apart and failed to pull ourselves together every time a predator or world event killed a loved one. Animals all over the world know this too well. You’re talking to your buddy, Squeaky, and in mid-sentence a hawk snatches him away. You hear him scream as he’s being eaten but your job is to run away, lose your mind for a few minutes, then go on. Humans have largely done away with this fear, rising to the top of the food chain. In many parts of the world we wake each day with the biggest concern being what to wear. But in some countries, as Louis CK once said, they wake knowing “oh shit, they’re cutting off our heads today.” Still we find a way to go on because what the hell else we gonna do?

You go back to being normal, knowing you’re different. You stuff it back into a little place in your head and you go back to work, or scratching on the ground, hoping you’re not next. It never dawns on us the irony that to feel this way means we’re alive. Otherwise there’s not much left to worry over.

So in my head there’s a big, open field of grass that spreads out for miles. Small, rolling hills dot its vast expanse. Around you are running thousands of other people, running for their lives. It’s the great human race, ceaselessly trudging across the landscape. Randomly some wink out, their presence gone except for the long path behind them, the years they spent among us stretching out into time.

Humans understand time, and sometimes that’s a bad thing for those trying to enjoy the ride. Enjoying the ride means not paying attention to the future. But not paying attention to the future means accepting greater risk of loss. The trade-off is degrees of happiness. The dog doesn’t care about the future, only the day with you. But let’s get real; that’s possible because of the relationship with their human. Shelter and food means less worry. It’s a perspective thing I guess.

Every day she gets up thinking whatever she wants is on the menu. She comes to me several times a day to request my services. What does she know about Syria or Zika or any of the terrible things going on in the world? She doesn’t have to know because I do that for her, much the same way I did for my son as he grew older.

We do that for our loved ones; we absorb the pain when we can. That’s how the earthquake survivor gets over it. That’s how the plane crash survivor picks herself up and moves on. We do it together. I know this is America and we do many things as individuals, many great things. But we suffer as one.

Thank goodness we have puppies to remind us of the important things.