Thought for the Week: The cat came back
Richard Thompson considers human nature
It’s 7:30am. I begin my morning sitting, looking out onto our back garden, with a clear blue sky and everything still. Ah, no! A neighbour’s black cat jumps down from the hedge at the bottom where he has been looking for birds’ nests. He sidles towards me heading for the side gate. I rattle on the window to show my displeasure. The cat slinks past me. I resume my sitting and ponder a while on the cat’s nature, which has not an ounce of empathy for the little birds.
I accept that there is some of that cat’s nature in me. We humans have a long ancestry of trying to survive in difficult conditions. We are a strange mixture, but don’t like to admit it. I see this nature of mine in my silence and let it go. You can guess what happens. The cat came back! Only three or four minutes later, it returned by the side gate, through the little back garden in front of me, jumped up onto the shed roof and disappeared into the bushes to begin his reign of terror again.
My question to myself now is: What can I do to make my cat – or, to put it another way, my self-centred nature – come back less frequently? I haven’t a clue, so I wait. I think of the early days of Quakerism. One of the strong features of the early Quakers was their readiness to acknowledge the fact we all have both light and darkness within us. Isaac Penington said that we don’t have to accept the power that the darkness has over us: ‘Heed not distressing thoughts… fear them not but be still awhile, not believing in the power which thou feelest they have over thee’ (Quaker faith & practice 2.48).
James Nayler wrote: ‘Art thou in Darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will fill thee more, but stand still and act not, and wait in patience till Light arises out of Darkness to lead thee’ (Quaker faith & practice 21.65). Self-centredness and self-deceit are the foundations of individualism. Friends today are as deeply influenced by this as are any other group. We tend to avoid this discomfort. It’s just ‘not done’ to dwell on our negative experiences.
At about midday, after I have returned from my piano lesson, I remember my teacher telling me off because I spoke of the difficult notes at the beginning of the bar I’m working on. She said: ‘Instead of talking, just listen!’ I was putting my energy, she said, into words instead of keeping my attention on the quality of the music. It reminded me of a little one-line poem in which I asked a question to life: ‘Do you know what I’d like to do? Listen to you.’
This doesn’t mean I go into a comfortable daydream. My paradigm of reality means whirling waves of both joy and grief. There is, on one side, the wonder of being alive and the sensing of friendship within millions of people, but, on the other side, there is the callousness, greed and ignorance which cause so much suffering. According to the charity Shelter, 150 families are made homeless in Britain every day.
I must keep things simple, so I remember ‘P&O x 2’. This has nothing to do with cross-channel ferries. It’s ‘Plenitude and Originality by Pausing Often’.
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