Cat and Cicada

The heat wave spread through the streets of Toronto today, sending out a wave of cicadas (sometimes known as ‘heat bugs’). I saw a cat sitting in the middle of the driveway on my way to the subway. When I looked closely, I could see that the cat had caught a cicada and had turned it upside down. When I got closer to the cat, she edged away to the other side. I talked to the cat, and she meowed back to me. Meanwhile the cicada still struggled to right itself. The cat didn’t seem too interested in it after a while, and started to head back to the house to which she presumably belonged. And she continued her prate of meowing.

 I wondered what the cat was really thinking of the cicada. Did she perhaps think, “I wish that were  a bird?” Does the cat feel disappointed when she realizes what she caught? Why did she lose interest so quickly?

I think that disappointment is probably just as relative as my example suggests. When the cat spots something flying, she might identify it as one of many potential things. In the same way, disappointment is based on some image or idea of what I think it supposed to happen in any given situation. But I already see how powerful my thoughts are in the present situation, when I see how I project thoughts onto the cat that are not hers! So this disappointment is really the feeling that arises when the current thought doesn’t match the content of the previous expectation. But in this example, the feelings of triumph or disappointment have nothing to do with what the cat has actually caught. Some cats might still think that the insects are some kind of food for them. And some might still think that what they caught is a kind of bird. Appearances are like that.

The sense of failure is also like that.  It is a kind of juxtaposition of conflicting ideas, and it sometimes can create terrible feelings. I think it is because from my earliest years in school, teachers had to impose strict standards on what would count as a pass or a fail. And I decided to internalize that script of pass/fail, not realizing that it is only a convention that the teachers use to get people through the schooling system and assign standards to work. It is probably not really learning and the real learning might just happen when I recognize it is just a convenient standard. It is like: here are the rules for Monopoly, for chess etc. and people follow the rules because that is what keeps  the game coherent. It doesn’t mean that I don’t follow those rules. But if I can see that they are just guidelines to keep people flowing together, I don’t need to attach failure as something that cripples me or hurts me to the point of inaction. It doesn’t mean that I won’t feel disappointment, but it means that I don’t need to associate failure with an inability to use the mind.