It’s a Cat’s Life

I’ve been on holidays for a couple of weeks, and Blogging is about the last thing I’ve thought of; the weather has been phenomenal, and I’ve been enjoying the outdoors like never before.

I live in a suburb of Vancouver, which, at times, can be quite a rainy city. July and August are usually quite nice, but this July has been completely without precedence;  Vancouver set a record today, the thirty-fourth day in a row without even a trace of precipitation (the previous record was recorded in 1953). It looks like there will be zero precipitation for the entire month.

Any time I’ve spent inside has been spent either reading, watching a short movie with my daughter, or rearranging/cleaning our home. Yesterday, I spent the entire day shifting around bookshelves in our bedroom, and one of my daughter’s cats spent the day sleeping on the only corner of the bed not covered with books and/or other extraneous materials; I continuously piled and removed material from around him, but he managed to sleep through the entire event.  As I was grunting , he was snoring (‘purring’), and as I was heaving, his paws were twitching as if he was dreaming of chasing his favorite prey. I suddenly realized that somewhere in the scheme of things I’d gone down the wrong path: the life of my daughter’s cat was the one that was (surely) meant for me.

Since then, I have been treating my daughter’s cat with the reverence that he obviously deserves from his build-up of positive karma.

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Karma

You are what you do.

Karma, to a Buddhist, is not fate; rather, it is an energy shaped through conscious thoughts, words, and actions.

The common understanding is that your karma has been determined by something you did in a past life or earlier in this life; karma is viewed as a cosmic justice system. But in Buddhism, karma is an intentional action; we create karma every moment, and the karma from the past, and the present, effects us every moment we live (this is a key point: your past and present actions affect the present, and your present actions affect the present and the future). Your actions are karma; and your future is not set, but can be altered by changing your willful acts and self-destructive behavioral patterns (e.g.: Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol). Karma is the action, not the result: the results of your conscious actions are the fruits of karma.