Welcome to Unscripted, a weekly reflection on what it means to live without inherited stories, rigid identities, or predetermined purpose. Each Monday, I explore a different part of this shift toward presence and clarity—one moment, one breath, one pencil stroke at a time.
There are seven dogs at Oak Hollow.
They arrived at different times, from different places, carrying different histories. Some came timid. Some loud. Some cautious. Some hungry for attention. None came with a plan.
They don’t share a philosophy. They don’t know the language I use to describe this life. They don’t care whether I’m present or distracted.
And yet, they may be the most reliable teachers of presence I’ve ever lived with.
No Narrative, No Improvement Plan
The dogs don’t wake up wondering who they should be today.
They don’t rehearse yesterday. They don’t plan tomorrow. They don’t carry a storyline about progress, productivity, or meaning.
They wake up. They stretch. They step into the day exactly as it is.
If there is sun, they notice it. If there is food, they eat. If there is movement, they follow. If there is rest, they take it.
Nothing is optimized. Nothing is withheld. Nothing is postponed.
Their lives are not efficient. They are complete.
Attention Without Agenda
One of the quiet surprises of living with animals is how differently attention behaves.
When a dog looks at you, there is no strategy behind it. No expectation. No story.
The attention is total, but uninvested. Present, but unattached.
They don’t want you to be better. They don’t need you to change. They don’t expect a version of you.
They simply register what is.
Being around that kind of attention has a way of stripping things down.
The mind, so used to narrating and evaluating, slowly loses its footing. There’s nothing to perform for. Nothing to explain. Nothing to manage.
Just contact.
Time Without Measurement
Dogs don’t experience time as a problem.
They don’t divide the day into productive and wasted hours. They don’t rush toward the next thing or resist the current one.
A walk is the walk. A nap is the nap. Waiting is waiting.
Time isn’t something they spend or save. It’s something they inhabit.
Watching this, day after day, begins to loosen the grip of urgency. Not dramatically. Not all at once.
Just enough to notice how much of human life is lived somewhere other than where the body already is.
Relationship Without Identity
Each dog has a personality, but none of them carry an identity.
They don’t introduce themselves. They don’t defend who they are. They don’t live up to a role.
If one is cautious, it’s cautious. If one is playful, it plays. If one needs space, it takes it.
There’s no tension between who they were yesterday and who they are today.
They don’t remember themselves.
That absence of self-story creates a surprising kind of freedom. Not freedom from constraint, but freedom from commentary.
They live without an inner narrator explaining their lives to themselves.
Presence That Doesn’t Try
What makes the dogs such effective teachers isn’t that they are wise or calm or enlightened.
It’s that they don’t try to be anything at all.
Presence isn’t something they practice. It’s simply the condition of being alive.
Living alongside that kind of unfiltered existence does something subtle to the human nervous system. It lowers the volume. It shortens the distance between thought and experience.
You stop asking: Am I doing this right? What should this mean? Where is this leading?
You just notice: This is happening.
How This Fits the Pencil-Driven Life
The Pencil-Driven Life isn’t about becoming more disciplined or more intentional.
It’s about removing the extra layers we’ve learned to carry.
Dogs don’t erase. They don’t revise. They don’t reflect.
They simply move.
And in that movement, something essential is revealed: life doesn’t need a storyline to be fully lived.
Sometimes the clearest way back to presence isn’t through effort or insight, but through proximity—to beings who never left it.
A Small Invitation
You don’t need seven dogs. You don’t need animals at all.
But you might notice:
- where attention already rests easily
- where time doesn’t feel pressured
- where you aren’t managing an identity
Stay there a little longer than usual.
No lesson required. No meaning extracted.
Just notice what it’s like to live without an agenda—even briefly.
A Closing Thought
The dogs don’t know they’re teaching anything.
They don’t care whether I understand them. They don’t need me to apply the lesson.
They simply live.
And in their living, they quietly remind me of something I keep forgetting:
Presence isn’t something to achieve. It’s what remains when nothing else is required.
The pencil is already moving.
The Pencil-Driven Life 