Animals have a wonderful ability to live in the present. Nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman called them “placid and self-contain’d…not one is demented with the mania of owning things…not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole Earth.”
With those observations in mind, I often consider our cat. I sit with him on my lap each morning. It takes him a minute or two to make himself comfortable in the doughnut-shaped cushion we’ve provided. But then he takes on the Zen-like attitude of a little monk, simply being here now. I find his demeanor instructive.
He rarely seems troubled by anything that isn’t an immediate threat. Of course, unwelcome dogs or strange people in the yard (the postman, for example) may put him on high alert, but in their absence, he doesn’t appear to think about whatever potential threats there might be to the calm of his daily routines, although who really knows what cats think?
It’s easy for us to become overwrought with tensions based on imaginary concerns. By “imaginary,” I don’t mean unworthy of our consideration. Climate change is real and dangerous. Overdose drug deaths suggest murderous exploitation by criminal elements. Nuclear war is a real and potentially fatal threat to continued civilization.
By “imaginary” I mean all the associated fantasies that emerge in one’s mind, simply by the incantation of the named threat. Say “climate change,” and who doesn’t immediately imagine storm surges, atmospheric rivers, wildfires, drought-stricken landscapes, or floods? We’ve seen them, events that have occurred elsewhere or at some other time, but if you’re reading this, they’re not happening now, to us.
The same fact applies to any of dozens of other horrors whose potentials for pain and suffering assault us each day through varied media, fake news or not.
Pierre Poilièvre bemoans on TV that “Canada feels broken,” a hyperbolic whining that ignores the thousands of people, immigrants from around the world who come here, expecting a better life, one that is demonstrably safer and more prosperous than in the countries they have left.
Canada is certainly changing. How could it not? Huge forces are at work in the world. The two billion people on Earth in my adolescent 1960s have become more than eight billion now! (If a cancer is a runaway growth, it’s hard not to see humanity as a cancer on the global body.)
We too often delude ourselves that the way things were “when I was a boy” are supposed to remain the same, forever and ever, amen. We seem to forget that less than two centuries ago the European colonial project was overwhelming the strange and distant cultures of the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Now those varied peoples are on the move. We’re all becoming a gigantic family of intimate strangers, related by chromosomal basics and knit together as a multinational community by trade and telecommunications infrastructure.
It’s tempting to wisecrack, “Tradition is a thing of the past.” We may celebrate traditions, but revisiting the value of some of them is probably long overdue.
Sitting outside a few evenings ago with my feline sensei, I overheard a couple passing on the sidewalk singing, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” For a moment I wondered how they came by their calm.