THE TURTLE AND THE CAT

June 12th, 2018

It’s easy to envision the turtle on it’s back, legs flailing, potentially doomed.

Often it can feel as though a mindset has grown such a kind of inconvenient shell that is bound to betray it’s original purpose of protection and truly leave us feeling like we’re fucked.

Sometimes solving a problem only makes things worse.

The problem might be thinking there’s a problem in the first place: trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist simply creates. . . problems.

What is so precious in our thoughts and beliefs that needs such protection?  If a thought or belief, or set of beliefs must be harbored from injury, is it so valuable?  Should not it work the other way around?  Should not thoughts and beliefs have the durability that they enable us to take wiser action?  Would it be better idea to have beliefs that are more akin to the variability of events?  Beliefs that are flexible, agile and can react swiftly to some sudden and unexpected turn of tide?

Cats always land on their feet.  It’s easy to envision the way a cat stretches and flexes so quickly in the air to reorient itself.  It needs no shell since it can rely on it’s swift flexibility and agility to deal with circumstance as it arises.  It does not prematurely anticipate what kind of circumstance may arise and grow a cumbersome shell in hasty anticipation.

Different animals for different environments perhaps.

But which has achieved more freedom?

The one that relies on the kindness of motorists to stop and wait while it slogs from one bog to the next, bogged down by it’s own cumbersome protection?

Or the other which has domesticated all mankind and made the internet a shrine of it’s divinity.