Well Rob, I do recognize and acknowledge what it is you see when you look out and through your life. We've all had different windows and even looking toward the same place through the same glass have it manifest differently. If I turn to walk away , then slip on ice, split my head and am extinguished I shall still be glad to have outlived the nine lives that curiosity would have allowed me had I arrived here as a cat. (and truth be known, you choose not to live in a darkened closet, latched and walled, or you would not have the cell with you to note things which catch your eye, or even have the comfort of the memories of an exquisite partner in earlier times. we choose how to breathe the remainders with what is at our hand)...(warmly and genuinely replied, p.)
I'm also pleased that you didn't arrive as feline; there's little to back up the theory of the nine lives! We had, at one time, around twenty-three or so cats, all of them spawned from the two abandoned (by their mama) kittens that Ann and I watched being dumped by said wayward mother. It was a striking experience: she walked them along the perimeter of the garden, paused to look up at us on the terrace with out large alsabrador pooch, decided in an instant that we were harmless and soft touches, and then she was gone - alone.
From that pair of females sprang the rest. Our dog, a female, would lie on the terrace looking at the new arrivals in their cardboard wine box lair, uttering the occassional squeal of frustrated motherhood as she would move ever closer to them. The mother cats would ignore her. They certainly know where there is threat and where not!
But, there was a very heavy rate of attrition with kittens in the semi-wild; many didn’t make it to anywhere near maturity, most being felled by some form of cold or flu that stopped them being able to recognize the smell of food, and it would be distressing to see them starve to death, heaps of food available beside them. For those even younger, one could see that the mothers knew; they would cease trying to offer them milk. We even tried taking a couple to the mother’s teat but she just looked at us as if we were crazy.
Another thing that was relatively common with the very young was an eye problem: the eye would swell up like a grape and actually burst. So, be pleased you’re no cat!
Anyway, one good life, if you can get it, is worth a few poor ones. Personally, I rather believe that it doesn’t all end here on our deathbeds. I’m sure that everything around us is far too complex to have been the result of ‘accident’ or Big Bang; based on that, I also think that were it all to end in a box in the ground or in a furnace, it would have been absolutely meaningless and a waste of effort on behalf of whatever power created it all in the first place. Simply put, I think it’s all too good (life) to have been designed as a throwaway product.
At least, the thought comforts me.
;-)
Rob C