Our cat died a few years ago, but we’re currently giving food and shelter to a cat that belongs to one of the kids.
As most cats do, it sleeps a lot. And even when it’s awake, it can sit for hours and be (apparently) content.
I can’t do that. If I were to try to sit down and do nothing on a Saturday afternoon, my mind would immediately starts accusing me. “You should be doing this, or that, or 45 other things.” I have a never-ending list of things that I could or ought to be doing. There’s always something that needs doing.
I am able to relax after a long day of working, where I figure I’ve done what I can for the day, and whatever tasks are calling to me can wait until tomorrow. But even then, the mind is constantly making lists and planning all the little details I’ll eventually have to attend to.
From time to time I think it would be nice to attain a cat’s level of laziness and not have a care in the world.
Of course that might be a complete misrepresentation of the cat’s inner state. It might be so still because it’s scared to rouse the coyotes that are lurking in closets and under beds. It might be saving its energy for that life-saving dash to escape the vacuum cleaner. It’s apparent serene attitude might hide a state of constant fear and anxiety.
But I’d rather believe it’s just chilling. Somebody in the house should be.
Some element of it must just be chilling. My cat was an inside/outside cat for a brief part of his existence, but is now solely inside. When he was outside part of the time, he was much more active and curious even though there were more potential genuine dangers to him. Now that he’s inside (and ever since he’s been inside, even though he was still quite young when he ceased to be allowed out), he really just lies around all the time except for maybe a few minutes a day (and not every day) when he gets a bit crazy and playful. I really think cats just somehow adapt to an inactive life if there’s no reason for them to be active. But the apparent mind emptiness fascinates me, too.
Not a cat but a bear, but I always remember That Hideous Strength when thinking of animals:
There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colours of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, attached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.
The bit about believing he had grasped the absolute makes me wonder if some hallucinogens put people in that state, or something like it.
Timothy Leary.