home schooled by a house cat

My house cat taught me a valuable lesson: every once in a while, with the flavor of randomness, while lying in my bed next to my feet as he always does when we both are sleeping, he would, for no reason, and quite unexpectedly, bite my foot.

 

I would awake surprised, bewildered, and hurt, in a very literal way, kicking wildly at the source of my pain–wondering the age old question, "why?"

 

My house cat was a spirit guide–he was a stray who came from nowhere and he has since strayed back into nowhere; but for the months that he chose to live with me, he taught me a valuable lesson: everything is wild, no matter how tame it appears.

 

I scan through the morning headlines, viewing the neatly arranged tragedies on the front page–they are tragic because they are unexpected; they are tragic because nobody thought that something like that could happen, to anyone, let alone to them; they are tragic because we have all convinced ourselves that life, the world, other people, currency, politics, religion, and everything else we know, see, feel, taste and experience, are tame–but they are all as tame as a house cat, who snores sweetly at your feet for months while you are sleeping, only to attack for no reason when you are most vulnerable, least aware, and unwilling to accept that it will ever happen again, even though it has happen so many times before.

 

My house cat taught me a valuable lesson: "tame" is a cage–it is a cage within our minds, but it is a cage nonetheless; and nothing, that is nothing, three times nothing, is content living in a cage; it will always look for some moment of weakness for which it can find opportunity to escapeor inflict injury on its jailor.

 

I now realize that I am most miserable in those moments that I am trying to tame myself–living within my self-imposed cage, neatly nestled within the cages of social norms, religion, decency, respectability, success, and whatever else; all cages within cages and I find that I am too cramped to be happy–I am a house cat, lying at the feet of those who have assumed that I have accepted my captivity and tameness, and I bite them all when they least expect it.

 

My house cat taught me a valuable lesson: after months of sitting on my lap for hours while we watched tv together; after months of jumping on top of my computer keyboard whenever I was trying to work; after month of greeting me at the door when my car pulled into the driveway; after months of coming to me whenever I called, running to his dish whenever I shook the bag of food, after months of begging for treats as if I, and I alone, could grant it some ephemeral happiness; after all this alleged tameness, he would clamp his jaw and sink his teeth into my foot when I was sleeping, without warning, without remorse, without apology–he was a stray and I never bothered to name him, I just called him "cat"; but now I know the perfect name for him:

 

I should have called him "life."