The art of just being

Humans just don't get it. They rush around the whole day, filling up every waking moment with activity.

Take my human and her family, for instance. They work pretty long hours. The few hours that they are home, they go work out [hey, what's the bloody point in getting all sweaty?], read or clear the mail [mainly bills!], clean the house or do laundry.

[Yes, Virginia, life gives you three certainties when you are a human: death, taxes ... and dirty laundry. We moggies only need to contend with one of the three. Ergo, it is better to be a moggie.]

On weekends, they spend time with the kids or their friends. Or they are preparing to have friends over - shopping, cooking and cleaning the house and then cleaning it [again!] when the party is over. That's fun??

Even younger humans are scheduled to death, aren't they? If they aren't in school, they are going for tuition or doing homework or going back to school for some "co-curricular activities", or going for enrichment classes in music [violin or piano, take your pick], art [even if they have a snowflake's chance in hell of becoming artists] or the languages. Kids nowadays are so easily bored. They get restless and complain when they have nothing to do, and this carries over into adulthood.

Humans should just learn the art of Being. I spend a lot of time doing that. Sometimes I just sleep, of course. But I am also content to lie down, propped up on my elbows with my front paws tucked under me. Then I just Be.

Sometimes I sit up straight with my front paws together and stare at a point ... oh... maybe 2.84m in front of me. This almost always freaks my human out. She thinks I'm seeing "things" [read "spirits"] in the house which she cannot see. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. [Anyway, freaking her out is half the fun.]

But mainly, when I sit there just being, I become really aware of my surroundings - every smell, every sound and the thump-thump of my own heart. Sometimes, I think about things, Great Thoughts about what I've seen going on around me - or whether I should sleep in my basket or annoy her by jumping on the red sofa.

But truly, when one just sits and does nothing in particular, one can cultivate one's inner life. It's a more silent world there, with none of the daily distractions, noise. With people rushing around doing this or that - mostly tied to the mundane logistics of daily life - they hardly have time to recognise this inner world, do they? It's a world of the unspoken, the intangible.

I've heard my human complain time and again that the weekend "went by too fast because we were having fun". What crap. The weekend stole away while she was busy trying to do the 25 things she set out to do. She should have dropped half or three-quarters of those things on that "to-do" list and then sit back and notice the difference.

I don't have a Masters in the Art of Being for nuthin'.