(Reprinted from my blog http"//slicesofmylife.net)
Sometimes you reach a place in your life where you long for simplicity, and I am there (again/still). Only simplicity can be a lot of work, depending on how long and how thoroughly you've been living the antithesis of it. I have moved more than a dozen times in the last decade, so I've already done a lot of the work of paring down in my life. Every move required further scrutinizing over what is a necessity and what is just clutter. I have to say that after de-cluttering for a full decade, it is still mostly just clutter. Unfortunately, some of it is necessary clutter, and what is defined as necessary will vary from person to person. This is not a treatise on de-cluttering. It is an introspective look at what constitutes simplicity for me. Simplicity is what I think of as an uncluttered life. While I think that it is nearly impossible to have an uncluttered life, if you have a cluttered physical space, I do think it is possible to have a completely organized, de-cluttered physical space and yet still have a cluttered life. One may be excessively neat and tidy on the outside and a complete disaster inside. While simplifying your life can always start in your physical space, eventually you will need to work your way inward, and if you haven't spent much time living an examined life, that can be far scarier than working your way outward.
I mostly simplify and de-clutter my life from the inside out rather than from the outside inward. I'm already inside my head and heart most of the time. I have been extremely introspective all my life. Even as a teenager. Once I discovered the world of writing in diaries, at the ripe old age of nine, I was hooked on introspection. Yes, like anyone who writes in a diary, I wrote at times about the people and events in my life, but I soon shifted to the more slippery world of thoughts and feelings about the people and events in my life. Beyond that there are the feelings and thoughts about the feelings and thoughts and hopefully you don't keep on going to the point of infinite regress, which I think after a while would resemble insanity, even though it might really be genius. By the time I entered early adolescence, I was already in touch with my feelings and thoughts. I was voicing my concerns and Angst over the state of the world in general and over the state of my life in particular. I've never looked back once. Never stop digging inside myself to try to figure out what made me who I am, which ultimately made me a student of human nature at large. It is why I find other human beings, and now all other beings, so interesting. Granted there are some beings, human and otherwise, with whom you could reach the bottom of the well rather quickly. Others require a lifetime to plumb their depths. Those are the ones I find completely enchanting. They are the ones who surprise me with their insights and ingenuity.
What does all of this have to do with brushing cats? Everything and nothing. There are periods in my life when I brush one cat in particular a lot. That cat is Dustin. He is one of my feline soul mates, and he is also a barometer for the state of clutter in my life. Not so much physical clutter, though I've found that my cats will let me know if that is getting too out of control for them. If there's a pile of books on the coffee table (a.k.a., my desk since I no longer have one), they will be sure to knock it over when it gets too high. That's a good reminder to shelve the ones I'm no longer using for research, self-growth, or leisure reading. If I get too many papers stacked up, they'll push them onto the floor. My cats are good for me in that way. I cease to see the stack of books or papers if I'm deeply enough inside my own head. They bring me back out of my head with their need to be fed, petted, and pampered. That's where the brushing comes into play.
When my life is too cluttered with appointments, work schedules, and other demands on my time and energy, I don't spend much time pampering Dustin. Dustin is a very clean cat, so he doesn't actually need for me to brush him. He always looks like his suit has just been cleaned and pressed unless he's just come in from an untidy outdoor world that harbors sticky, damp things that attach to his beautiful gray coat. But give him a few minutes and what doesn't drop onto the floor for me to clean up, will soon be meticulously licked away by this most fastidious fellow. No, my time with Dustin is bonding time. It is nurturing time, both for him and for me. Having time to brush him with his soft bristle brush means that I'm making him a priority in my life, but it also means I'm making me a priority in my life. I'm slowing my life down to a place where I have time not only to think about brushing him, but I make the time and space to do it. Now that his much younger sister, Anjolie, has decided that she likes brushing every bit as much as Dustin, there are twice as many opportunities for moments like this. Twice as many reminders to slow down and take time smell the flowers, or in my case, brush cats.
