house cats
These days, it is easier to let my mind be a house cat.
It’s easier to let my attention be passive, a small mammal in a temperature controlled box who enjoys being picked up and stroked, who will soon have no muscle in her body because she doesn’t have to exert herself towards any single thing.
She is purring, content, as I watch a standup show, scroll through reddit, tiktok, twitter, entertained and too sedated to notice that I have not felt the sun on my skin or created anything new in days.
I am letting my attention stay soft and purring because it is easier than being wild and hunting my own food. Why bother? I can order doordash from the couch. There are also all the movies made in the last 100 years, someone to flirt with on a dating app, an always evolving discussion on other people’s problems on social media. When I have a difficult thought or emotion, I can distract myself with such seamlessness that I often forget there was a blip of discomfort to begin with. My emails and texts can be outsourced to an AI who can copy my linguistic mannerisms, the way I talk in run-on sentences. It’s conceivable to live my whole life like this.
The house cat in me loves passivity. It also loves convenience, all the modern inventions that make life effortless. What it doesn’t know is self-reliance, a life built from scratch. And while I do not plan to become fully self-reliant (to build my own house and grow my own food), I am starting to understand the things I want to do for myself.
I have been wondering how I can create guardrails against complacency. I don’t want to open instagram first thing in the morning and use the most precious, industrious hours of the day being passively fed canned food by an algorithm. It feels important to keep my mental fitness intact. I know I would regret it if I don’t, maybe because I already regret how much of my life feels passively spent.
When I zoom out on my life, my favorite periods follow a similar routine: running through the trees until my lungs heave, the bulk of my day spent working in a flow state, and a dinner table I stay at well past dark, laughing with my friends. And the feeling at the end: present, spent, satisfied. There may be no absolute value to any of these things, but I know if I keep having days like this, they will amount to a pretty beautiful life.
Without realizing, I started doing these things less. Because being complacent is enticing for a mammal that has gone through thousands of years of evolution to develop these pleasure circuits that reward effort, and are now exploitable with no real risk of failure.
But the house cat also has a secret. Underneath the pleasure of being entertained, the glossy comfort of safety, buried under all that, is a constant state of longing. The longing is for independence, for adventure; being an active participant in this life.
The house cat dreams of being out under open skies, where there are no screens, no doors, there is something shifting and alive, something being chased, a feeling of endless possibilities. The times I have been happiest, my attention was not napping in a patch of sunlit carpet. It was doing all sorts of random things: it was trying to hit the bullseye 100 feet away with the release of an arrow, it was somersaulting off a diving board for no reason but the sheer joy of crashing into water, it was saying yes to the electric challenge of approaching someone beautiful at a party. These things are varied, but what they have in common is: I am choosing experience over comfort.
In these experiences, my joy was also punctuated by moments of pain, frustration, fear, loneliness. I’m starting to realize that was kind of the point. By choosing a textured experience over a smooth one, there is a strengthening of some sort of muscle: a decision to do more reps to increase the fitness of this brain. The mind increases its capacity to stay unwavering under pressure, to hold contradictions, abstractions, to sit with something past the point of comfort. That kind of strength in attention can create so much beauty. That beauty exists, even if someone else can always do what I am trying to do better. Doing it myself feeds something inside me that watching someone else do it never will.
I am thinking about the elegance with which you can carry your body after you've spent hours and hours practicing a single pirouette, how that elegance gets distilled into a kind of effortless grace as you walk, calm, poised, through every door, trusting your connection to your limbs. Challenges are seen less like a thing you are trying to erase, and more like a training ground, a riddle, a game. Why would you want your entire world to be an suburban living room when you can find pleasure in a wide range of landscapes? And the pleasure from this is so much more durable than the pleasure of being a house cat: where no matter how luxurious your life is, pleasure means someone else’s hands have to be stroking you, keeping you alive.
Thank you for this writing. It resonates deeply at this time in my life. It seems the house-cat in me is often in danger of taking over and so I resist- some days.
Clever and useful of you, to declare the house cat who needs to be held and touched while full of longing for a more textured life, with a person who scrolls endlessly and does not bother to create, to emerge, finally, into a shape choosing life self-designed, even if not one that stands out as superlative.
I love the nuance and thoughtfulness of your writing. Thank you. It merits reading a few more times to catch the poetry, something I rarely find to be worth repeating.
Have you written a book? These essays would make a great one. Thanks again.