How to Think Like a Cat - Stephane Garnier 2018

Your Cat Knows How to See the Fun in Everything

’When I play with my cat, who knows whether it has more fun with me than I do with it?’

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

We sometimes wonder if life is serious when we learn the hard way. So it’s important to know how to have fun, in order to mitigate its sometimes darker aspects or simply to choose to approach a situation from another angle (glass half full or half empty?).

Knowing how to have fun is a key condition for happiness. Overly serious people, forever stuck in their fanciful thoughts, sometimes end up incapable of knowing how to play, have fun and laugh; they are virtually incapable of smiling.

Play is one of your cat’s main occupations, and hunting is a part of that, as cruel as this can seem when you see it tossing a maimed field mouse about for hours, letting the poor thing escape for a few inches before pouncing on it again. But it’s your cat’s way of amusing itself, just as we humans have invented myriad ways of laughing and having fun.

Know how to laugh (and above all how to laugh about everything), know how to not take yourself too seriously, know how to put your social standing to one side — just think of those times when you hear people say something like: ’I’m sure you understand that I couldn’t allow myself to do that, it would undermine my position.’

Self-image, cultivated pretences . . . We must forget everything, all of those human traits that prevent us from having fun and laughing.

Laugh! At everything! At yourself! All the time!