Parable of a kitten

A couple days ago, I thought about how, at 12 weeks old, a kitten gets suddenly put in a box from which it is let out perhaps an hour later, in a place it has never seen before, and where it will never again see where it had been the first 12 weeks of its life.

And I thought either (or both) that the animal had to be pretty sturdy of character to successfully handle this, or else that cats are more "independent" than persons, as in the classic haiku about a puppy:

The puppy
because it does not think 'Autumn has come'
is naturally enlightened.

I kept thinking about this during the following day, and then I had one further thought:

Yes the kitten is torn away from one environment and thrust into a wholly different one

but the difference between this and the kind of dis/re-locations in life we persons experience is that, in the place the kitten arrives to, extensive measures are taken to help it adjust.

--I remember as a kind of waking nightmare, when I was "in school", at the beginning of each semester, I got very anxious about registering for courses (would the various professors be there to sign the authorization I needed from them?), and about buying textbooks (would the bookstore run out of them before I got there?)*.... (Why couldn't the school have sent out a course selection form several months in advance, and then have handed each student their course books at registration, like a litterbox and food and water dishes are set out for the kitten before it arrives?)

I end these thoughts by noting -- correct me if I am wrong -- that the word economics derives from the Greek: oikos, which means: the daily life of a domestic household maintaining itself as a household in its domesticity, i.e., securing the satisfaction of the household members' basic biological and emotional needs --

Including, in the case of my cat Abiko, a curious eagerness still at age 12 years, to grab and play with a piece of uncooked spaghetti held out to her, which I hypothesize may derive from her having had pieces of spaghetti to bat around and chase on the kitchen floor at the cattery she came from....

*Does my anxiety prove I am not fit to survive? Let us recall once again that the father of evolutionary theory -- Charles Darwin -- was a fragile man who was enabled to function in life by having inherited wealth and a highly care-giving wife.

Return to Misu's kittenhood....

Practice not overlooking the obvious.

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10 May 2006CE (2006-05-10 ISO 8601)
v02.22

[ Study in the company of good friends is the proper activity of free persons... ]

Each person needs to be a peer member of a world, a family and a community: cosmos, oikos and polis.