Have you ever considered that cats can teach us a valuable lesson about life? It’s a great secret, actually. One that we can hear over and over, but never quite ‘get’.
I should be more clear, however. The secret lies not with cats, but rather with the butts of cats. The rear end.
You know how you scratch the rear of a cat, right at the end of their back, where it turns into tail? And the cat just sort of lifts up her butt. Maybe wiggles it about a little bit.
Let’s pretend for a moment that we want her butt to stop wiggling. What do we do? Well, we stop scratching, of course! She might be a bit peeved that you’ve prematurely ceased petting her, but her butt will drop right down, just like magic. It’s that easy!
This is exactly, precisely, just like life. Whenever we have problems with stress or lack of happiness or a troubled relationship, all we need to do is stop scratching! Can’t we see that it’s our effort that is causing the problem? We’re so busy trying that we miss the obvious reality of the moment, and end up spending all our time and energy on imaginary problems.
But we don’t do it this way. If we have a problem, we start scratching. After all, problems aren’t just going to go away! So we scratch harder and harder, and the but wiggles more and more, and if we scratch hard enough, the cat might just topple over from the sheer joy of it! If it’s a problem we’ve been scratching to death, it finally crashes down, and our relationship or our finances or our career just falls to pieces.
You can watch this happen all the time in relationships. You might even be able to watch it in your own! One person gets a little grumpy, and what does the other do? They probably get a little grumpy in return. Demand to know what’s getting the other person upset. Try to solve the problem. Get frustrated because the other person doesn’t seem to want to solve the problem – they just want to complain! Poop or get off the pooper!
What if, instead, we didn’t scratch? What if we saw the person just as they were, and didn’t need them to change their attitude? We could say — “ It’s okay to be grumpy. If you need to vent, just vent away. I’m right here.”
Then the person might vent a little. Or they might just smile a little and find themselves suddenly able to laugh at how grumpy they were. You see, when we’re not busy fighting the emotions we’re having (scratching them), emotions are able to move through their natural life span. And believe it or not, all ‘negative’ emotions have very short life spans. It’s only when we try to resist them that they get all balled up and wiggle about and last for hours or days or even months or years.
It’s amazing, really, how simple life is when we’re not scratching everything. It makes me wonder why we keep trying the old ways over and over, trying to force life to do our bidding. It’s so much easier to learn a little lesson from a cat.
Everything I ever needed to learn in life I learned from a cat’s butt! Amazed and confused? So was I when I saw the title of the post but actually what Kenton Whitman says makes a lot of sense so stop scratching!