Birds, cats and people have something in common: embarrassment. When faced with failure - large or small - birds and cats react differently, but they are definitely embarrassed.
Cats, normally acrobatic, fall and pretend the mishap never occurred. Francis, or F-Cat, provides the perfect example. He’s 15 years old which is approximately 95 in human years. ( 5 people years equals 1 cat year – a number I just made up - selected mostly because it’s close to 7, which, without any scientific proof is a number people readily accept for dogs, and 5 times 15 is easy to multiply in my head). The point here is that he’s not the svelte feline he used to be. Yet, he never gives up trying. He just can’t get it through his head that it’s a real bitch to leap to the top of the fridge. His reluctance to accept the armchair and crossword puzzle of old age is probably due to his rapid physical decline – one day he’s scaling the 6 foot fence and the next he’s shopping for a segway. We attribute this sudden change to the death of our other cat, Zoot. Zoot was a portly and prissy fellow; picture the bastard child of Pee Wee Herman and Dom DeLuise as a cat in a tuxedo and you’ll have a pretty good picture of him. Just following Zootie’s death, F-Cat doubled his weight. The current theory is that he ate Zoot, or at least absorbed his spirit and with it his fat content.
F-Cat is now a rotund 17 pounds, a poster cat for the excesses of our western lifestyle. But, he can still lick himself in all the places necessary for good feline hygiene, which I am enormously thankful for as the last thing I want to do is to clean my cat’s anus with a baby wipe. All this extra pudge has meant that he often uses his claws to haul his ass up, a practice unpopular in our household, especially when the destination is the back rest of our new leather couch or the bed, via a handmade quilt.
He’ll leap, slip, grab, slide and plop on the ground. If you happen to notice his little blunder, F-Cat makes it clear that he meant to do that. He doesn’t have to regain his composure, because he never lost it. Without missing a beat he begins grooming, often by rolling back on his rear, sticking his back leg straight up in the air in a yoga pose and cleaning himself from belly on down to the place mentioned in the previous paragraph. I hope the latter part of the exercise is not a yoga pose, but I’d never know. I tried yoga once and fell asleep while attempting some sort of ‘relaxing’ exercise. I never went back because I was pissed off that I paid $15 for a nap on a crappy mat. And, yes, I was embarrassed.
Sweet William reacts differently to his mistakes. A poor landing or a slip while climbing makes him furious. And when something pisses him off, you know it – he makes sure everybody knows it. He screams, paces, and flaps his wings up in his scariest ‘fuck off, I’ll cut you, man’ routine. I find it tempting to laugh at the 100 grams of feathered fury, but one look at the scar on my finger reminds me of his ability to follow through on his threats. He demands to be taken seriously. Deeper than my fear that he’ll lash out is my empathy. You see, I understand his outrage.
People can go either way. I know it’s more complicated than that, but on a basic level, it isn’t. I can imagine the question on a dating website – “When you make a mistake, are you more like a cat or a bird?” The answer is revealing. Kind of like, “If you could have one super power, what would it be?” (Of course that’s a weed out question - anyone who says anything besides omnipotence is just plain stupid.)
Failure. A bird or a cat. It’s the ninth inning, two outs, score tied, bases loaded, and you’re the last batter. A powerful swoosh at nothing but air - that’s strike three and the season’s over. Do you slam the tip of your bat into home plate and grit your teeth? Do you push your shame down deep, nonchalantly shrug your shoulders and tell your teammates that your plan worked and now you can all go get a beer?
Now for the tough stuff. The real complications come when our mishaps have nothing to do with physical errors, something Francis and Sweet William know nothing of. Neither of them has ever made a mistake on their taxes, failed an important test, made thoughtless career moves or blathered drunkenly to their boss at an office party pretending to enjoy golf. Lucky little bastards.
As we know, or some of us do, there are degrees of error. The mistake on taxes can be corrected with a 1040X – a do-over provided by the IRS since they know that there are plenty of tax paying morons. Some tests can be taken twice, thrice or more if success is all that important, and if one is very lucky, the boss at the office party was so hammered he thinks you really do like golf and the Christmas tie with the twinkling light really is cool. But take it up a notch. Some mistakes are not fixable.
A hard fall. A broken nose. Can one recover? Will the nose always be crooked? Poor judgment can domino, knock over others, even people you care for so deeply you’d take a bullet for them. (Well, you’d jump in the line of fire if you were pretty sure it would hit an extremity, not your torso or head – your ass perhaps - you’re just not that selfless.)
These situations generate big questions. How to cope with the loss of friendships, pride, the respect of your peers? In one part of your brain there is an excuse factory which churns out bullshit to console yourself and perhaps look for anyone or anything to blame. But the factory has to shut down. Excuses muddle responsibility. And as an FYI, so does vodka and red bull, although there is a moment that the muddling of just about everything can be quite therapeutic, when used responsibly.
Responsibility. Francis and Sweet William remain blissfully ignorant of this burden even when leather is ripped and skin is broken. And there’s the big difference. Taking responsibility is the only way to resolve the shame, sadness and fury that wraps around you on your downward spiral, much like the way cotton candy whirls around and sticks to a white cardboard cone. It’s sticky and tough to get off, but in the end you just have to eat it, digest it, and well, deal with it. In the words of a good friend of mine “You’re a total wastrel of a dipshit if you don’t buck the fuck up and deal.”
Falling is not the greatest shame. It’s not getting back up. I’d rather be known as a person who sometimes trips but always gets up from the fall, than a person who always succeeds. There’s a Japanese proverb, ‘fall down seven times, get back up eight.’ Eight just became my lucky number.
No comments:
Post a Comment