Reflections Of Tail Chasing

Sometimes I sit there and watch my cat chase its tail. And I think to myself: What a silly animal. So naive and so unaware, gaining pleasure from running in a circle chasing itself. How primitive a creature.

Then I get up to respond to an email from my CPA telling me how many made up pieces of paper with dead presidents’ photos on them I owe to the government that oversees this made up society where we work until 65 only to retire and supposedly enjoy life when all the tools for enjoying it are on their last legs, literally and figuratively.

Then I think to myself, Oh stop it, go clear your head in the gym to stop these useless thoughts. So I hop in a car and spew some CO2 for a few minutes, helping to pollute the one thing we need to survive, air in case you were wondering. Then I park this huge piece of metal filled with rare earth minerals that someone in Congo earns a dollar a day to mine, and I go into this big room where, along with other humans, I lift heavy things and put them down in order to simulate the hunter gatherer lifestyle and keep my body healthy so I can continue paying made up money to a made up society to support our made up economy.

Ironic, seeing as I took loans to major in economics.

Then I come home to my cat, passed out on the couch from a long session of tail chasing, and I think to myself, Is she the silly one or am I the silly one? Better yet, are we the silly ones? We have gotten so carried away with all these made up things that we treat them as if they are real, tangible elements of nature. We forecast recessions and downturns like hurricanes or earthquakes. Have people forgotten we literally made all this stuff up? There is no geological record of recessions or stock market crashes in the sediment layers of the Grand Canyon.

We take more seriously the stuff we invented and disregard the things that are actually real.

Now before you point out to me that I would not have the luxury to sit here and type this if it were not for the structure and continued innovation afforded to me by society and men long gone, I am well aware. And I am eternally grateful that I do not have to forage for food or kill a woolly mammoth for dinner while hoping I do not run into a saber toothed tiger. I also love my polluting vehicle and tend to buy the most polluting ones because I am a car guy whose inner kid loves the sound of a big German V8.

So where are you going with this then, you hypocrite?

Well, you see, my cat lives in the present. We humans spend thousands of dollars and countless hours listening to and practicing things, be it yoga, meditation, or reading a zillion self help books, to try and live in the present. Eastern philosophies advocate for mindfulness, acceptance, and harmony with the present moment as a path to peace and authenticity, or as a Lehman Brothers investment banker once told me as he was trying to convince me to do a line of imported South American snow, just gotta live bro. I lost touch with him for obvious reasons, but I sure hope he took his own advice in 2008.

Some go as far as to try to become Buddha, giving up everything society has to offer and just sitting and meditating all day. Basically becoming a rock.

We have trapped ourselves in the same tail chasing cyclical motion my cat does, except we have made it infinitely more complicated and forgotten that it is all play.

How can it all be a play if there is so much pain and destruction in the world? One, all the good plays have plot twists and pain. And a good chunk of the pain in this one comes from the fact that we have forgotten what it is.

We are literally the only living beings we know of in light years. Yet here we are, squabbling over land that we think we own, good luck taking it with you when you die, and the basis for conflict is that one group of people has a little more melanin than another or worships a different guy in the sky or has a good amount of dinosaur juice in the ground that we need to power those air polluting machines.

If you zoom out, we look pretty ridiculous.

We have become a cat that genuinely attacks its own tail in all seriousness, with no spirit of play, then freaks out once it starts bleeding.

How silly of us.

Enjoy the chase, fellow humans.