Читать книгу How to Live Like Your Cat - Roland Glasser - Страница 6

Some days, you don’t feel like going to work, watching the news, taking every catastrophe to heart or even caring about your own future. You don’t feel like having an opinion on the government’s latest reforms which make you gnash your teeth, any more than you feel like worrying over your career trajectory, or knowing if you’ll have much of a pension by the time you retire.

You don’t want to be constantly plagued by your own personal problems, which are themselves linked to those of your family and friends, and you don’t want to fret about the quality of your diet, or feel guilty for ‘destroying the planet’ every time you draw a bath.

You long to switch off and unplug from it all, just for a day, just for a moment, and breathe.

I look round to see that Ziggy, my cat, has padded silently into my study. He stares at me, blinking, then leaps onto my desk and lies down on the keyboard. It’s a little ritual that we’ve had for years now, stretching back to when I still did much of my writing in longhand and he used to bite the cap of my pen. It makes me laugh, this game we play. It’s as if on the one hand he loves that I write, but on the other hand he does all he can to prevent me writing.

Up until this moment, I considered his soft pawing at me, his comings and goings between my lap and the keyboard, to be nothing more than affectionate games. But perhaps he’s been trying to tell me something else all these years, something as simple as: ‘Hey, don’t you feel like downing tools for the day?’

Down tools. As he nuzzles his nose into my neck, I realise that, today, I don’t care if I’ll be able to pay the bills, or whether the stock market is about to crash. After all, does he care?

Maybe this is the secret he’s been wanting to communicate all this time: know how to let go, focus on the essentials, think about your wellbeing, be like him. Live like your cat!

Cats clearly live much better than we do. So why not follow their example?

This I did, by decoding how they operate, their aspirations and lifestyle. It had been there right in front of me, all these years, without me realising.

We have everything to learn from cats, in both our personal and our professional lives.

I invite you to discover their simple secrets, so you can take a step back from your everyday, find your wellbeing again, and smile.

But what do cats do right? How should we take inspiration from them?

From this day forward, imagine another way of viewing life, by living like your cat.