Animal

I experience deeper kinship with my cat than I do with most humans. When I look into his eyes, and he mine, there is beholding, beyond what words can convey. He loves touch, as do I. He treasures rest and nourishment, as do I. He values silence and solitude, as do I. He also longs for connection and play, as do I. We are animals, he and I, and all of us sentient beings, and it strikes me that we are more similar than dissimilar, with words and their importance greatly exaggerated, an occasionally happy, often convoluted, and sometimes unpleasant consequence of our current condition. When we face real difficulties in life—the death of a loved one, the dissolving of a friendship, the vanishing of a vocation, the forgoing of an identity, the scattering of safety or financial security—answers are few and far between, and the care we crave for our brokenness can be hard to find. These are times when our kinship with the animal kingdom might serve us as an unexpected resource for our reflection. As Derrida said, as with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called “animal” offers to our sight the abyssal limit of the human. And what is this limit? In part, it is precisely what we usually celebrate as the apotheosis of our pedigree: reason. We have even selected this as our primary self-descriptive. We are homo sapiens (“rational humans”). But there is no rhyme or reason to suffering, and suffering is also no respecter of species no matter how intelligent. Suffering happens. To be is to hurt. And we are each familiar with how logic and language fall short in their ability to address us properly in our suffering. Fortunately, there is wisdom beyond words for the unspeakable aching we all feel at one time or another. Rather than trying to reason our way forward, we might take a lesson in self-care and self-compassion from our furry friends when we find ourselves smashed, broken, bleeding, and at our wits’ end. Taking time to touch and be touched. To connect or to cloister away. To rest and to play. And above all, to abandon, at least for a time, our terrible tendency and brazen belief that we might think our way to a better tomorrow.