Another thing I did yesterday was go to kitten kindergarten at the SPCA. I felt like staying home, but I was unable to reach the kitten professors to cancel, so decided just to go do it, and to go to Rainbow for groceries on the way back, so I wouldn’t have to go out for the rest of the weekend.
It was an utterly gorgeous day, sunny and bright with a fresh breeze, awash in promise.
The SPCA is in an industrial area and I wasn’t sure where to lock my bike. Another cyclist advised walking to a nearby Safeway, not far, and locking it there, which was a good idea.
The class was very informative. Sixteen and a half years ago, I went to the SPCA to adopt a kitten, but came home with Thelonious, who was already two and a half. This time I may actually get a kitten. I might even get two.
The tidbit I thought was most interesting was that there are more black cats up for adoption not only because people are superstitious about them, though that’s part of it, but because there just are more black cats, period. They tend to be successful hunters because they can’t be seen in the dark, and so they thrive long enough to make more black cats.
I said to my mother on the phone this morning, “I can’t remember how Darwinism doesn’t work.” She knew what I meant right away and explained, “If a cat learns how to do embroidery, that wouldn’t be passed down.”
I had called my parents to say I’m afraid I will know when it’s time to call the euthanicist but I won’t be able to bring myself to do it and Thelonious will end up suffering. I described her current condition—sitting in her nest much of the day, as always; purring when she’s petted; playing a bit with the blind pulls but not chasing other toys; drinking plenty of water; eating very little but somehow enough to produce diarrhea two or three times a day. My mother asked, “She can still hop onto the chair?” I said she could and my mother said then it probably is not time.
My friend Amy said yesterday on the phone that one might think of Thelonious as an incontinent elderly relative.
Good news: I got an extremely nice note back from my building manager saying she hopes Thelonious and I are well, that she knows how hard it is to lose a cat, and that she hopes I enjoy my new companion. What a relief, and how kind that was. We are getting along very well these days, which I know is due to effort on both of our parts.
I’m not sure how she’ll feel about two cats, but as the lawyer at the Tenants Union pointed out, without my asking, the way my lease is written, it allows for multiple cats.
There was quite a decent article on Buddhist meditation in the latest Psychology Today, which said that people “freely gorge on oversize portions of mental anguish, what Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky calls ‘adventitious suffering—the pain of what was, what will be, [or] what could be.’”
There was also this inspiring bit, about Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and scientist: “Ricard may be his own best argument. Many who encounter him are struck by the sense of well-being he projects.”
I think my meditation practice has, over the years, made me happier and more peaceful, but the detailed thought-noting a la Ezra Bayda (that which caused my fundamental childhood anxieties to re-appear so blatantly in the past couple of months) has made it embarrassingly clear that a lot of free-floating unfriendliness remains.
When I encounter a roomful of strangers, such as in NERT class, as a rule, I take an instant disliking to all of them and then, perhaps, learn to like them one by one. I’m afraid my default setting is that a new person is presumed unlikeable, and of course if the slightest objectionable thing occurs, the person may as well be Satan. The people disturbing my Sunday morning with their radio are bad people.
It’s also helpful to investigate what my requirements are: I require people to follow the rules. I require them not to make noise when I’m taking a nap. At root, I require people not to do what I don’t like them to do.
Is it possible I can be happy even if someone is doing what I don’t want them to do? Is it possible the cars around me are mostly filled with kind and friendly people? In fact, that is virtually a certainty, so why do I assume that any stranger is someone I won’t like? I even do this in rooms full of Buddhist meditators!
Seeing thoughts and requirements clearly is helpful—I can’t address something I don’t know is there—but an antidote can also be helpful, and that is metta or lovingkindness, the cultivation of friendly feelings.
I believe I’d better add a bit of it to my daily meditation practice.
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