The Cat Distribution System Knows Best
How Fostering Kittens Helped Me Reframe Chaos
If you’re like me, you take solace in a sense of control—whether it's real or imagined.
When so many things in the world feel illogical, chaotic, and exhaustingly inefficient, stability and predictability give me permission to relax and enjoy life.
Maybe it’s not universal, but my sense is that most people desire control, or at least strive to control the outcomes of their lives, by insulating themselves with money and status and comfort. We strive for guarantees about the world and our place in it, when in reality, nothing is guaranteed. Even people with great resources and the appearance of great control over their circumstances face uncertainty, upsets, and shocks proportional to what they stand to lose. Even some of the mightiest and shrewdest in history have tripped and fallen.
Over the last five months of job searching and steadily watching my savings account and personal timer whittle down to zero, I’ve had to make peace with substantially less control than I feel I used to have.
I used to have a clear professional role, routine schedule, predictable expenses, and the comfort of future earnings to hedge against unforeseen costs that pop up here and there—like with my 26-year-old car. I might have been bored with my job, but I had an anchor.
And while I still have moments of existential dread, feeling anchorless at sea, I’ve made peace with myself—despite feeling quite out of control. I’ve done this by reframing my mindset and investing in my attitude, choosing connection and vulnerability, and inviting, rather than deflecting, little moments of chaos.
For example, it wasn’t my intention to foster two kittens in the midst of my own personal earthquake. I’m usually a rational risk-taker and I’ve always known that pets of my own would be a new layer of responsibility. They’re also messy, trigger my minor allergies, and eat fancy wet food three times daily. Normally this sort of lifestyle change would have felt highly disruptive to my otherwise pristine and controlled living space.
But I’m also having so much fun with them.
They get into everything, exploring every nook and square inch of my apartment. They play with my dirty clothes hamper, paw at my window shade pulls, and hide in a box under my bed full of wrapping tissue. Got confidential documents? Kittens will shred them in no time.
They play hard, eat, and sleep, and repeat this cycle two or three times in a day. When I wake up around 8am, they’re rearing for breakfast and full of the zoomies. If this was all they did, I might be less endeared to them. But they also cuddle like crazy, and there’s something viscerally comforting about a kitten’s purr against my bare belly. Apparently, the frequency of a cat’s purr (25 to 50 hertz) is well-matched to promote human bone density and growth.
When there’s litter all over my bathroom and I have to scoop a day’s worth of both their little poops and pee pees into the toilet, I laugh at the chaos of it all.
Adjusting to their rhythms has actually been easier since my own homeostasis has been disrupted. Their newness to this world reminds me of the fleetingness of life and of everything we stress over. Things are not that serious, nothing is so fatal as our egos can lead us to believe.
Under normal circumstances I probably would have said no to a disruption to my neat little life. But all this change feels destined.
I lost one thing but gained another—something that I did ask for at various points in the past while taking care of other people's pets.
Cat lovers have a joke…that the Cat Distribution System works silently and efficiently. If you want one (or two), the CDS will get them to you one way or another.