My lucky cats (and we could be next!)

Sitting here trying to think of a final Positivity Story to end Pollyanna Week. This whole thing was started by a friend whose life is really quite towered at the moment and needed Le Break of us always being all "go team" and "look at all the positive steps you've made." This person needed some recognition of the total crapitude of the situation. And I did agree. It's important not to downgrade the crapitude. And to sometimes just stop cheerleading and empathize.

But I started musing about positive thinking and that reminded me of the rat study, and my brain was inexorably drawn to how positive thinking can be a powerful survival skill if you're not seeing it as something superficial and goofy.

Anyway--just thought I'd explain where this all came from.

Today's theme comes from the Bibble. It's this: Time and chance happen to us all. It's not a positive message, it's a neutral one. Crappy things have happened to us, and may happen again.

My mother takes in stray animals, but do you think that gives her good animal karma? No. She gets regularly knocked over by big dogs at the dog park, which keeps wrecking her knees and ankles. She has the worst luck with dog-hit-and-runs you can imagine. Who knows why. I'm reading a magazine article right now, and its author's car is regularly hit by other drivers. Just weird bad luck. Time and chance.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. - Ecclesiastes 9:11

(Author of Ecclesiastes: Realist.)

But think of any animals you cohabit with who might be stray/rescue animals. Most of them probably have a remarkable survival story that ends happily--that is to say, with you! Our Evil Minion and her siblings were born in some kind of hay grinder or something--the girls working at the safari park spotted them before using the machine. The mother didn't return so they hand reared them and found homes for them all. Minion was the last, they couldn't find anyone, til the girl at work heard that our cat Sherry had died. She conned us with the old "I only want her to go to a really good home..." Minion doesn't know it, but she and her siblings came out on the good side of Luck.

Haley had it even worse. She was with a couple for two years and they brought her to the SPCA. They found her dangerous and unadoptable. She would have been put to sleep, but a shelter that fixes and releases feral cats took her in. Then my mother homed her while that shelter had to move. And while I was visiting Haley and I met and fell in love at first sight (or Haley manipulated me, however you want to see it). Then Fernando and I had to get scratched from head to toe 3-4 times before we understood her aggressive behavior and how to stop it--she was lucky she came to us.

Good time and good chance came to them, at their most Princess Leia hour of need. So if we need examples to inspire us that our luck can change, that we can go from the brink of death to a New Kitty Forever Home within the space of months, we need only look at the rescue-animals.

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? - Matthew 6:25, 26, 27

(Monsieur Jesu: Optimist.)

A Change Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke

It's Getting Better All the Time - The Beatles