How to Think Like a Cat - Stephane Garnier 2018

Your Cat Knows How to Rest, It Loves to Sleep

Your Cat’s Day

12.30: LUNCH BREAK

· Your cat has spent its morning strolling about, so why not do the same?

· Lunch in the gloomy office lounge? Not a great idea. The noisy canteen? Not much better.

· Why not use your lunch break to leave work to eat, preferably outside?

· Take the air, do a spot of window shopping, have a quiet stroll in the park and sit on a bench to eat your lunch. But take the air like the cat does. Wander as your heart desires. Get out, breathe, have a break and, with a nonchalant step, take your fill of the beauty in your environment — all those things you don’t usually take the time to look at.

· A good saunter is certainly the best way to escape, breathe and give yourself a chance of making some lovely discoveries, as well as meeting new people . . .

· Love at the corner of the street? Yes indeed, but you have to be strolling about to find it . . .

’If stretching were wealth, the cat would be rich’

AFRICAN PROVERB

’Don’t wake a sleeping cat’ goes the old adage. Look at how much your cat loves to sleep and sleep and sleep. We all love to sleep. So why don’t we take every opportunity to do so? Why not choose a little restorative siesta over the supposedly ’urgent’ washing up that ’has’ to be done, wiped and put away ASAP?

Learn to relax like the cat does. Let yourself slip away to slumberland whenever you have the chance. It’s so beneficial, for both mind and body, and you know it. Your cat — lying there softly blinking — has always known this.

Cats, those great artists of vegging out, don’t cultivate their sleep, but rather the joy of repeatedly falling asleep . . .

Sleeping is one of your cat’s great pleasures, from light sleeps to deep sleeps where it can be seen running in its dreams. For ’sleeping’ means resting, going to sleep and then dreaming. Don’t we all have dreams where we’d like to stay awhile? Sometimes we even have dreams we’d like to return to . . . Shh. It’s your inner sanctum.

Taking pleasure in sleeping won’t in any way prevent you from ’enjoying life’, particularly in the rather inadequate way we tend to understand this phrase.