animals

I’ve been trying to meditate for a year now. “Trying” means that once in awhile, I spend ten minutes with my eyes closed, and then annoy friends and family by insisting that I’ve reached Nirvana (you’re not allowed to do it if you don’t brag about it).

There was a time when I was doing it daily, and I felt a difference. But it’s subtle. It’s as imperceptible as a sugar high; you might be buzzing, but you don’t really notice until you come down, and the mild irritation hits.

And that’s a bit like what meditation is like; you notice when you don’t do it, not when you do. And that really sucks, because it’s difficult to convince yourself to do anything regularly, let alone something that you can barely register.

It’s only ten or fifteen minutes a day, and everybody has time for that. That’s a YouTube video. That’s a masturbation session. That’s a scroll through a timeline, a procrastination, a daydream.

But it’s just so much easier to do those things than it is to sit with your eyes closed and concentrate on your breath. Your breath is pretty damn boring, and like everyone else, I’m used to being constantly entertained; I could be spending those precious minutes watching some dick on YouTube desperately trying to change my political views through articulate misinformation, reading about how Trump’s tweets physically tore a hole in the ozone layer, or contributing to the pointless democracy of Reddit and Facebook with my “likes.”

I slowly slipped out of the habit, the way you carelessly slip out of any healthy activity, and now I meditate “once in awhile.” Whenever that is.

Irregular practice of an activity often means failure, even if you enjoy said activity. Without scheduled sessions, my meditation attempts are easily disrupted by mild inconveniences. I attempted to meditate the other day, hoping to clear my notification-obsessed mind during an unsatisfying writing session.

I sat in the living room, setting a timer for an ambitious fifteen minutes. All I could hear was the steady tick-tock of the clock, and I spent the first few minutes with my blood pressure slowly rising, unable to think about anything but dismantling that clock. It took every ounce of self-control I had to stop myself from removing the batteries, but eventually, I got over it. I stopped hearing the clock, and settled into deep breathing.

Then my cat found me. My cat is like a sexual opportunist at a house party; he’s excellent at spotting weakness, and will seize any opportunity to trap an unsuspecting victim into a heavy petting session.

I focused on breathing slowly, in, and out, while my cat furiously massaged himself against my unmoving hand. I believe that if I dropped down dead on the floor, he would spend several days rubbing his face against my cold, unfeeling fingers.

In desperation, I got up, and put some wet food in his bowl, out of schedule, just to distract him during my remaining eleven minutes. But have you ever heard a cat eat wet food before?

While I sat trying to regain my concentration, the slurpy smacking sound resonated from the bowl as though it were playing through a speaker beside my ear.

It sounded like a sea snail performing cunnilingus on a particularly slimy jellyfish, with great relish. And it takes him at least forty minutes to finish a can, because he licks it off one molecular layer at a time.

Haunted by the sound, and distressing mental imagery, I gave in. But the defeat sparked a flash of insight.

Because every time I feed my cat, I ring a little dinner bell first, so that he knows not to beg for food until he hears the bell. I do it so that he doesn’t wake me up at 3am asking for snacks (which he still very much does). But I figured Pavlov’s Bell applies to humans too.

And I happen to have a pair of tingsha bells in my office, because I am, at heart, a white stoner who fetishizes Eastern belief systems. The bells are some kind of meditation aid, but I found my own use for them by ringing them just before I meditate.

And so far, it’s actually working. The sound triggers a little thing in my brain that takes away the urge to go do something else. Once I’ve rung them, I simply have to sit down and breathe slowly.

Now all I have to do, is convince myself to ring it more often.

The other day, the family and I were taking a walk through the local nature trail (I say nature trail, but it’s really just a footpath with trees). While Kate was giving me a step-by-step rundown of Kim Kardashian’s latest feud with Krunchy Kardashian, I was staring into space and nodding sagely.

“That’s insane. Krunchy should not have spoken to her like that,” I said, making sure to throw in a slow head-shake, to express my sincere disapproval at Krunchy’s brazen, on-camera disrespect to her sister, or cousin, or whatever.

“Right? So Kim says that there’s no place for that in her family. None whatsoever. And so I was thinking we should apply the lessons learned from this blatantly false feud to the genuine disagreements I sometimes have with my sister, and listen to Kim Kardashian’s hollow, soulless advice that is so far removed from my reality, it might as well be an infomercial, which I think it might be, and tell my sister there’s no place for that in our family. None whatsoever,” Kate said, while texting her sister a message to go fuck herself.

“You should,” I nodded. “That sounds like the actions of a sensible person. Hey look – is that a rabbit?”

In front of us, in the bushes, there was a flash of brown fur. We all hurried over to catch a glimpse, and sure enough, within the bush lay a terrified, yet adorably photogenic, baby rabbit.

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww,” Kate said, practically collapsing in a teary-eyed heap. “Can we take him home?”

She was perfectly serious. But in her defense, I think the many demands of motherhood warp your perspective a little bit. In fact, before Kate became a mother, she didn’t give the slightest shit about baby animals, viewing them as a potential snack that hadn’t yet gone through the meat-grinder.

But sometime during the middle of pregnancy number 1, Kate had a dramatic, hormone-fuelled change of heart, and can now be brought to tears at the sight of a mama cat licking her kittens, or of a baby elephant doing absolutely anything.

The eldest’s eyes widened. This wasn’t an option he had ever considered, but it came out of the mouth of mom, so it must be legitimate.

“I want to bring him home, daddy.”

I thought for a second, and decided I didn’t want to be viewed as an asshole, because as the father, that’s usually your role. So I said, “Sure. If you can catch him, we can take him home.”

Obviously, the baby rabbit, whose heart was pounding in his tiny chest, would bolt the second we got a step closer; it was a safe bet that’d make me look momentarily well-intentioned.

Kate edged closer, and reached for the rabbit. He didn’t react at all. He even let her stroke his fur.

“What the fuck?” I thought.

Kate was as taken aback as I was. No doubt, the creature was paralyzed with fear, but the eldest interpreted it as consent to be taken captive.

“Pick it up mummy!” he shouted, a steely glint in his eye.

Kate gently wrapped her fingers around the rabbit and was weirded out by how gross it felt, or something, because she screamed and let go. Finally, the bloody thing scampered off, out of sight.

The eldest gave out a loud, frustrated yell. The youngest giggled, always amused by the eldest’s despair.

“That’s a shame,” I shrugged, trying to conceal my relief. “If you caught him, we could have taken him home. But he’s gone now. That sucks.”

“Look, he’s right there!” Kate cried, pointing to the path ahead.

I couldn’t believe it. The wretched creature was sitting three steps ahead of us, right on the path, frozen with terror again. Clearly, the thing had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever, and was destined to be devoured by the next fox that happened to pass by.

“Can you pick it up and take it home, daddy?” the eldest begged.

Kate looked at me with her giant anime eyes, pleading silently.

Goddammit. What the hell was wrong with this thing?

I edged toward it, making as much noise as humanly possible. The rabbit didn’t move a muscle. It was right there – if I picked it up, I don’t think it would have protested in the slightest. And I was just about to, when a comment I read on Reddit the other day flashed through my brain. Read it here, and be prepared to be paranoid about contracting rabies every time you step outside, for the rest of your life.

In a nutshell, the commentator describes how the slightest scratch, or bite, from a wild animal could result in a deranged descent into incurable madness and death, even several years after the seemingly-innocuous scratch. After reading, I had resolved to never-ever touch so much as a squirrel.

What if this weird little bunny bit me? There was clearly something wrong with it, at least from an evolutionary perspective. I moved closer, and the creature’s instincts finally kicked in, and it ran off, away into the deepest part of the trail, to a place that I decided was unreachable.

The eldest gave out another wail of anguish. The youngest giggled again. Kate was sincerely disappointed.

“Why didn’t you pick it up? It was so cute.”

The eldest echoed her sentiment, with more exclamation marks.

Later that night, after putting the kids to sleep, we finally relaxed on the sofa and put on Netflix, trying to avoid thinking about all the tasks we had to do tomorrow.

Kate sighed satisfactorily, and said, “I’m like, so glad you didn’t pick up that rabbit. I’m not in the mood to deal with that right now.”