Life Lessons from Cats

Learning about freedom, aloofness, self-assurance, and nonchalance from our animal companions.

This is Thalia, chilling in the dryer. Photo by MJ Blehart.

I’m sitting in my home office working on some stuff, when I hear my wife calling out, “Thalia, no! Really?”

Thalia is one of our two cats. What she had done was leaped up into the clothes dryer. Once inside, she decided to lay down and look out at us, as if to say, “I am here — what are you going to do about it?”

It occurred to me, then, that there are some rather important life lessons you can glean from cats. The way a cat lives life may seem rather ridiculous sometimes, but when you get right down to it there’s a certain wisdom in it.

Here I present to you several of the lessons we can learn from our cats.

Run because you can

If you are a cat owner (and I use this term loosely, because let’s face a fact here — cats are “owned” by nobody) you have probably watched your cat zoom by. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, they flash past you once again.

There is no rhyme or reason to this. They just run and leap and climb and chase invisible things you and I cannot see. It can be super adorable and super annoying.

Yet they just go. They run because they can.