My strong-willed and territorial housemates sometimes surprise me by being flexible.
It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention – and given our current living constraints, an attitude of flexibility can also come in handy. Whether we’re cancelling a long planned-for trip or substituting for a missing recipe ingredient, living a narrower life means deploying a broader range of acceptable options.
Watching my cats can sometimes help me to fine-tune that ability to solve an issue and go with the flow.
This morning, the bright sun was a welcome sight after one and a half cold, gray April days. Toward the end of my early morning run, a T.S. Eliot poem surfaced in my mind, often quoted by my late father: “April is the cruelest month, mixing memory and desire, breeding lilacs out of the dead ground…” My own lilacs seemed to have survived the snow and cold, as the sun bathed their just-emerging leaves.
Our two cats have full-time jobs: following that same warm, soothing sun around the house. They start their day with a pre-dawn breakfast while I drink my morning coffee, then they settle on the sofa closest to a furnace duct. They each have a preferred resting place: one on a pillow, the other on an afghan. Minutes after the sun peeks over the house across the street, one cat quickly relocates to the top of the carpeted cat perch in the east-facing window. The other cat—well, when you snooze, you lose.
Today, the loser gave me a lesson on how to be flexible and still get your way. Silver, curled up in a deep sleep on her afghan, had realized a little too late that the sun was shining on prime real estate. The top level of the cat perch was now occupied by her roommate Nacia.
At that point the curtain opened on a domestic feline microdrama.
First, Silver pondered and then rejected the feasibility of a king-on-the-hill style assault to gain the sweet spot. She then opted for the lower level of the perch, which had good sun despite its inferior position. Problem solved—sort of. Nacia’s long, luxuriant tail, dangling from the upper level, brushed Silver’s ears as it swung rhythmically but briskly.
I expected Silver, normally a reactive sort of cat, to give up in a huff. But the sun’s appeal carried weight. She turned around and resettled in a position that put her entire body out of reach of the annoying feathery pendulum. Both cats could then enjoy the pleasant warmth.
Under normal, un-stay-at-home circumstances, this little moment might have passed by unnoticed. But recently, I’ve been able to turn my attention to smaller details and sometimes even appreciate their hidden lessons. For example, a workaround (which we all seem to face in abundance during these times) doesn’t have to involve a wearisome process of re-thinking, or over-thinking. And the end result might meet or even surpass our expectation.
