I used to be into the fourth decade of my life earlier than it occurred to me to ask myself why it was that I favored cats. I suppose that I took it so as a right that I favored them that it didn’t appear to be a query value asking. Cats have been one of many drumbeats of my existence, as they’re for thus many others: there from the second I returned home from the hospital, plump-faced and mewling; and there each morning now, looking at me, anticipating my alarm by 10 minutes.
At any charge, I used to be harassed by this query: why did I like cats? And in the long run, my makes an attempt to reply it started to resemble a brief guide.
In an effort to get nearer to the reality, I put the query out to tender, asking everybody I knew who was keen on felines – why do you like cats? And everybody had a distinct reply. “I can trust cats”; “cats aren’t as needy as dogs”; “cats make me laugh”; “cats are independent.” (Why do you like cats, reader? I’m dying to know. Really.)
I discovered quickly sufficient that merely observing my cats was enough for all kinds of options to my query to come up. Cats have bodily autonomy; they categorical their sensitivities with out self-pity; they defend what issues most to them; they don’t again down from needed confrontation, however will abandon a neglectful proprietor with out fuss or drama.
For every advantage that I perceived a cat to have, a human foible (from which, sadly, I’m not exempt) made itself plain to me. We habitually hide our vulnerabilities; we fail to defend our boundaries; we postpone our wanted conflicts, we dress our complaining within the language of closure …
Cats are definitely curious and cautious and skittish and territorial. We all know this. But they’ve many different attributes which categorical themselves extra subtly: braveness, a keenness for routine, affection, adventurousness, and a capability to maneuver on and adapt even to radically altering circumstances.
However, I had the instinct over the course of these months that I used to be orbiting some central feline high quality with which almost all of the others have been inextricably certain up. Each cat attribute was like a paint stroke on a canvas, slowly coming along with the others to kind a transparent picture. And it revealed itself to me when I discovered myself reflecting on how though cats usually look alike, the distinctness of their individual personalities at all times shines by. Why? Because they’re completely, ruthlessly and intensely themselves.
Cats categorically don’t care what we predict. They will do no matter they need to do with out concern for a way we would interpret it. That is why we belief them; we are able to at all times take them at face worth. We, in distinction, might be so involved with what others consider us that we develop into like Proteus, at all times shape-shifting: we censor ourselves and water down our lives; we use the digital world to create new identities. And we lose contact with ourselves. We discover out that we don’t actually know who we’re. We have worn a masks for thus lengthy that we’ve forgotten what the face behind it seems to be like.
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Of course, it isn’t the simplest factor to be ourselves. And the very fact is that nobody can train us learn how to be ourselves. It is so tough to be ourselves in a world that’s at all times forcing us to check ourselves to 1 one other, and screaming at us to retreat in the direction of the security of conformity, that being who we’re has usually been seen as a non secular advantage, the upshot of years of silent meditation or give up earlier than some conception of supreme actuality. Per Thomas Merton: “For me, to be a saint means for me to be myself.”
Perhaps that is because every single person who expresses themselves truly and wholeheartedly contributes to the common good and enriches our shared existence; I am convinced of that. And cats can teach us this. They teach us that we are at our best when we stop trying to be other than we are. Cats will always be my muses; but they will also always be my role models: graceful yet silly, cautious yet reckless, agile yet clumsy, full of wonderful contradictions – “the criterion,” as Simone Weil put it, “of the real”. Cats categorical the unmoderated persona.
