When I return home from work in the evening, one cat is stretched on the rug before the wood stove, the other lies on the coffee table, front paws draped over the table’s edge. It’s a scene of utter cat joy.
My daughters are laughing on the couch about something foreign to me — some kind of iPhone. I pull over a chair and sit down with a bowl of potatoes and vegetables and meat.
While they share a story about their negotiations over dinner dishes and compost and wood chores, I soak in the warmth of our living room.
All around us rages the virus, a rising irritability, utter uncertainty over the future. For years, I’ve relied on my ability to figure out a plan. Listening to my girls, I decide this is the heart of my plan: be like the cats. Drink in where we are now. Let that nourish us. And, for God’s sake, laugh at the jokes the kids tell.
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
— James Baldwin
Stony Soil Vermont 
I feel the same dichotomy in my house. The world is getting sucked down the drain, but at home, in my little private space, everything is calm and happy. Although my cats wouldn’t be caught dead lounging in the same room as one another.
I suppose cats are like people — we don’t always want to be in the same room. 🙂
Isn’t there a ‘saying’, “God laughs at our plans” ~ or something like that?
Living consciously in the ‘now’, set goals but remain flexible, keep things in perspective; we are but a speck in the universe and in time.
Be like the cats is pretty sound advice, I think.