Seeing the trees as well as the forest
Zadya woke me up this morning with the cat version of “Mommymommymommymommy” – delicately but insistently pressing her tiny, soft cat paw on my neck and face, and when that didn’t yield results (I can ignore a lot when I’m mostly asleep), she started nosing at me. A cat paw with claws sheathed patting on your skin is actually quite nice, but a vaguely-damp kitty nose and it’s attendant whiskers pressing into your nose, cheeks, and eyelids isn’t quite as ignorable. So I grumpily acceded to her demands for “pettins,” and after a few minutes of growing increasingly more conscious, rolled myself out of bed.
Then a funny thing happened. My inner monologue was griping away about “damn cats” and “hate mornings” when it suddenly occurred to me how much crankier I’d be if I had no kitty to nudge me into wakefulness. Even moreso, I started feeling grateful that the furball was so insistently affectionate.
The older I get, the more I realize it’s all about perspective – how you choose to look at something, more than what you’re looking at.
If my kitty never “bothered” me out of my slumber, it would probably mean I didn’t have a sweet kitty.
If my kids never drove me crazy with insistent demands the minute I walk through the door after work, it would probably mean they didn’t trust me & care about my attention enough to come to me with their problems – or that I didn’t have the blessing of having children.
If my beloved never came to me saying, “We need to talk; there’s a problem,” it would probably mean I was in a dreary relationship with an insensitive man who wasn’t all that interested in my happiness or how long we lasted – or that I didn’t have a beloved at all.
If my job never occasionally got boring or even annoying, it would probably mean I didn’t have a job.
If my friends never disagreed with me, and never gave me the sort of talking-to that doesn’t exactly make me feel perky, it would probably mean my friendships were superficial and largely meaningless – or non-existent.
If my house was never cluttered or even downright messy, it would probably mean everyone who lived there was too anal-retentive to be tolerable – or that I didn’t have a place to call home.
If I didn’t have more books than I had shelves to put them on, it would probably mean that I was too busy scrabbling to afford the basic necessities of survival to enjoy the luxury of owning more books than your average filthy-rich medieval scholar – or that I was the sort of person who didn’t read for pleasure, or that I lived in a time & place where women weren’t allowed to be literate.
If I didn’t occasionally spend several days cursing the horrible cold & cough I was suffering (like now), it would probably mean I was dead.
And if I didn’t ever think about perspective, and have the ability to consider the silver lining in every cloud, it would probably mean that I was too immature, or closed-minded, or just plain selfish, to understand & appreciate that the way I usually perceive things isn’t the only way – or the “one true way” – that they can or should be perceived.
Happy New Year to all.
