General

Sting the cat watches the sun rise from the picture window overlooking the back yard.

Between 10 and 11 each night, we experience what we call “The Wafting” at our house. Our home, built in 1962, only has one HVAC system to heat and cool all three levels. As a result, our top floor bedroom gets really stuffy in warm weather.

Fortunately, we have an attic fan in the hallway that draws in nighttime’s cooler air if we open the bedroom windows. This is “The Wafting.” As soon as our cats hear the attic fan rumble to life and the window locks click, they position themselves at the foot of the bed.

Both Chewie and Sting are indoor-only cats. They experience the outside world from the confines of their sunroom and a picture window in the living area. They delight in the smells of the mysterious outside only when we deliver them. They sniff the soles of our shoes like an unhappy housewife seeking traces of perfume or lipstick on her husband’s collar. They dutifully follow Zach to the screen door when he barbecues on our back porch; oh, to inhale that snifter of pollen and grilling meat. And they tilt their snouts in the air, twitching the tips of their flat noses like rabbits, when the summer breeze comes wafting through our bedroom windows at night. Witnessing their joy at such a simple act makes me want to continue “The Wafting” into the winter months.

My vivid imagination allows me to see my younger, more adventurous cat, Chewie, jump onto the window sill, crash through the flimsy screen, tumble down a storey to the yard below, scamper across the street, and escape, never to be seen again. To prevent such heartache, I only open the windows a touch and close them before I turn off my reading light to sleep. That is my paranoid ritual.

Our older cat, Sting, has graduated from quirky creature of habit to annoying protector of useless rituals. He demands feeding with persistent meowing, then nuzzling, then clawing, then biting until you wake up and feed him. I would understand his bad behavior if it were inspired by hunger. It’s hard to believe that’s the culprit when I rub the sleep out of my eyes and shovel kibble into an already overflowing pet food dish.  Sting’s dish is never empty, but he insists on receiving his morning and evening rites just the same.

I guess whether we are human or cat, weird habits become guarded rituals when we attach sentiment to them. The sentiment outlives the purpose, causing us to wash, rinse and repeat on auto-pilot.

What odd rituals do you follow?

Has this ever happened to you? You get up from your desk after an hour or two of working diligently in front of the computer. You stretch your back. Tilt your head to the left, then lean it gently to the right. You abandon your work station and walk the ten whole steps it takes you to arrive at the break room.

Then it hits you. You haven’t the faintest idea how you got there or why you’re there.

You start gazing at your surroundings for a clue. This is the break room. But it’s not lunch time, so you’re not there to retrieve your Lean Cuisine from the freezer. Are you thirsty? Maybe you’re there for water?

As you start to recall your purpose, a co-worker enters and strikes up a conversation about last night’s American Idol results show. After a few minutes of making small talk about the first season without Simon, you walk back to your desk and settle in at your chair. You stare at your water bottle and wonder why your mouth is dry.

This phenomenon isn’t unfamiliar to me. (Well, maybe the American Idol part is uncharted territory. I’ve never watched an episode of the show.) I’m 36 years old and don’t believe I’m developing early onset Alzheimer’s or dementia. I attribute the problem of forgetting the simplest tasks while I’m in the middle of completing them to 140-Character Syndrome, or information overload.

I self-diagnosed my 21st Century ailment while seated in a waiting room this morning. I wasn’t checking my BlackBerry for emails and voicemails, or reading Facebook wall posts and tweets from one of the three accounts I monitor on my iPad, so I had time to peruse a cover story from a February issue of Newsweek. In the article, Sharon Begley describes how the “Twitterization of our culture” is limiting our ability to make good decisions. Scientific measurements show that the near-constant influx of data actually shuts down a part of our brains at times.

Hence, my inability to select the right paint color from among the thousands of swatches at the hardware store. It also explains why I usually have three or more tabs open on my Web browser at any given time; I’m trying to open and seek information in each tab before the ideas become ether. I know it’s why I open an email in Outlook at 8:30 a.m. and finally respond and delete the message at 6:30 p.m. I’m too jacked up on information.

But I’m a communications professional. Listening is an integral part of my job. Micromanaging the din and synthesizing it into byte-size pieces is what I get paid to do. How do I turn it off?

For a while, we had a technology-free night at least once a week in our house. Wow, is that hard to do. But blissful. We may have to reinstitute that. I pet my cats. I pick up my new guitar and lose myself in some chords or arpeggios in the middle of the day. I read fast-paced suspense novels or chick lit at night in order to shut down my brain so that I can sleep.

What was I writing about?

Photo courtesy of Dennis Gatz on Flickr

I’m back home in Atlanta after a quick weekend trip to visit both sets of parents in Tennessee. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had conversations with friends and family members who are experiencing big transitions in their lives – divorce, new job, layoff, retirement, illness, caring for older parents – and it’s made me more pensive than usual tonight.

My thoughts directed me to a book I’ve been reading off and on for the past week, Deepak Chopra’s Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul (Amazon affiliate link). Chopra challenges popular beliefs like time is our enemy and we’re doomed to develop certain traits or diseases because of heredity. He argues that once you tune into your body, you can turn off any negative genes that might cause your body to erode more quickly or succumb to certain diseases. He says that’s why people in a recent study, who altered their lifestyles significantly through better diet, exercise and meditation, caused changes to 500 genes. Chopra also says that identical twins are born with the same set of genes, but have a completely different genetic profile as senior citizens.

The basic premise of Reinventing the Body is not new. It’s basically saying that attitude is everything when it comes to aging. Chopra cites study after study that shows people with the right attitudes lived longer, richer lives. The key is resilience. The person who adapts to change and perseveres through major life events stands a better chance of surviving a heart attack than the marathon runner with a chip on her shoulder.

I have a tendency to want to absorb my loved ones’ problems or anything that causes them pain. I wish I could unburden them and hurry them through the tough stuff, but it’s not healthy for me and I’m just not that powerful. Perhaps the best thing I can offer them is an empathetic ear and an example of someone who is trying very hard to be more in tune to her life and more resilient?