Last Tuesday I was having one of those days. You know the kind. Where your coffee tastes like disappointment, and your to-do list seems like a direct challenge from the universe. I was rushing aimlessly when this orange tabby just… materialised. Right there on Mrs. Chen’s front steps, stretching in a patch of afternoon sun like it had discovered the secret to existence.
Here’s the thing: I almost didn’t stop. I almost continued rushing toward whatever meaningless deadline ate my brain that day. But something in that cat’s complete commitment to its stretch made me pause. Have you ever really watched a cat stretch? It’s like watching yoga performed by someone who actually understands what yoga is supposed to do. Total presence. Completely connected with its body. Zero anxiety about whether its fur looks weird from that angle.
I should mention that I’m terrible at mindfulness. I’ve tried meditation apps. They instruct in calm voices that make me irrationally angry, “Notice your breath.” Meanwhile, my brain is busy making grocery lists, replaying conversations from 2007, and wondering if penguins have knees.
But as I stood there watching this cat, who had now noticed me and looked at me with a benevolent indifference only cats can master, something changed. The world got… bigger? Smaller? Both.
The cat let me pet it. Exactly three strokes before it decided I’d had enough privilege for one lifetime and wandered off to inspect a dead leaf with the intensity of a forensic investigator. But in those forty-five seconds, I wasn’t worried about my deadline. I wasn’t replaying that awkward thing I said in the meeting. I was just… there. Hand on warm fur. Sun on my neck. The smell of jasmine from somewhere.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say that petting the cat transformed my life, right? That I found enlightenment through cat fur and quit my job to start a mindfulness blog from Bali. But life doesn’t work like that. I went back to my day. The deadline was still stupid. The coffee continued to disappoint.
But.
It helped. Those forty-five seconds really did help. Later, when I was lying in bed doing that fun thing where you catalogue every mistake you’ve ever made, I remembered the weight of that cat. The particular orange of its fur in the sun. The way it purred for just a moment before deciding I wasn’t worth the effort.
We’re so bad at this, aren’t we? At stopping. At seeing. We’ve turned our lives into an endless scroll. We optimise our morning routines and hack our productivity, and treat our existence as if it’s a startup that needs to scale.
Meanwhile, the world continues to present these small wonders. A moth that looks like a piece of bark until it moves. The way light strikes water droplets on a spider web and suddenly you’re looking at tiny prisms. That moment when you catch someone else noticing something beautiful and you both share a brief, silent understanding that yes, we both noticed, we’re together in this strange, challenging, sometimes beautiful world.
Buddhism suggests that suffering comes from wanting things to be different than they are. And yeah, okay, sometimes things need to be different. Injustice needs to be fought. Pain needs to be addressed. We cannot simply pet cats while the world burns.
But the world is always burning. It always has. If we wait for it to stop burning before we allow ourselves to notice the small, perfect things, we’ll die having never really lived. We’ll spend our whole lives moving from one crisis to another, eyes glued to our phones, missing the cats.
Right now, there’s a mockingbird outside my window, doing its whole repertoire. It’s 11 AM. This bird is giving a full concert to absolutely no one, just because it can. Isn’t that both hilarious and profound?
The other day, I saw an elderly man feeding pigeons in the park. People walked by giving him those looks. You know the type. They seemed to think he was wasting time, making a mess or encouraging “pests.” Yet, he had this smile. This completely unguarded, childlike smile as these ridiculous birds with their shimmering necks and dinosaur-like feet gathered around his bench. Clearly, he was enjoying his morning more than all of us hurrying by to our Very Important Things.
That’s what I’m starting to understand. It’s not only about cats but those moments when life cracks open a little and shows you something else. Something outside the narrative you’re spinning about how hard everything is, how behind you are, how nothing is working out the way it should.
The world doesn’t care about your narrative. Flowers bloom whether you notice them or not. Birds sing whether you listen or not. Cats stretch in sunbeams, utterly detached from your personal crisis. This isn’t just indifference. It’s a form of grace.
I’m trying to get better at this. At stopping. At seeing. I fail most days. I walk past a thousand small wonders because I’m too busy being the star of my own tragic drama. But sometimes… Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I pause to pet the cat.
In those moments, I swear the world gets both bigger and smaller. Bigger because you realise how much is happening outside your own head. Smaller because suddenly you’re not alone. You’re connected to this cat, this moment, this patch of sun, this endless chain of beings striving to exist in whatever way they can.
Look, I don’t have answers. I can’t tell you how to live. I probably should have stopped writing this three paragraphs ago. But I know this: we’re all going to die. And between now and then, we can either rush through life consumed by anxiety and ambition, or take moments to stop and pet the damn cat.
The world is beautiful and terrible and complex and full of cats who don’t care about your problems. Thank god for that. Thank god for all of it.
So here’s my simple advice: Stop. Look. Notice. Pet the cat if it lets you. Watch the bird. Smell the jasmine. Allow yourself forty-five seconds of not being productive. The world will wait. Your problems will wait. But this moment—this cat, this light, this brief gift of consciousness in an indifferent universe—won’t.
Take it. Even if your hands shake. Even if you feel foolish. Even if you’re late.
Especially then.
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