Out on my evening walk tonight (I almost always take a walk after work…it has become increasingly important to me for my overall well-being.), I encountered what appeared to be a stray cat. I say “appeared to be,” as there were no tags on it – tags being the way we humans have demonstrated “ownership” over others. (But that is a different topic for a different evening.)
In any event, I encountered a stray cat, and though my first impulse was to walk away from it (after all, don’t stray cats ordinarily flee from humans?), I decided to stand in one place and see what the cat would do. Well, the cat approached me, and proceeded to do its cat thing: brushing up against my leg, over and over again, and alternately rolling around on the ground, both in unmistakable pleasure.
As the cat rubbed its head against my pant leg, I had thoughts about how the cat might be ill (perhaps why it was coming close to me?) and how the cat might be transmitting some sort of disease onto my pants. And the impulse that accompanied that thought was a fearful one, which prompted me to want to remove myself. Thankfully, that thought was quickly supplanted by a deeply felt pang of concern and affection for the cat, wondering about where it came from, if it would be safe, if it would find any lasting pleasure in its life. And so I stood there under the street light, me and the cat, for a few minutes, both of us basking in the unexpected source of pleasure we had encountered.
When I eventually decided to walk away, it occurred to me that we are all like that cat – every single one of us, actually. We are all roaming around on this planet, seekers of pleasure and security, sometimes connected and sometimes orphaned. And, when I think about things like this, it fills me with compassion for other beings, human and non-human, and makes me want to have kindness as a defining feature of my own being, because one never knows the journey and the trials that another has been experiencing and enduring on a daily basis.
I will probably never know the real story of that cat’s existence, but I am fairly certain that I impacted that cat’s life for the better. I am entirely certain that it impacted mine in that way. And I truly hope that I can make that kind of an impact on others who, like me, sometimes wander and feel lost, sometimes feel stable and are satisfied.
10th Leper Gratitude 