[Please begin with this short video - it is about four minutes that will change your life]
Pete the Cat - one of the great teachers of our time.
Its kind of a weird story though, isn't it? A cat that wears shoes and steps in massive piles of berries, probably costing a lot of money and that shouldn't just be left sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, followed by clumsily wandering into mud and water all with the tranquil sedated look of a young jazzy hipster in a coffee shop.
Yet somehow this story is capable of communicating the common human experience of navigating the world.
And I think that there is something here that our world and our culture could use a little more of.
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
The beautiful thing about Pete is that he isn't dependent on anything.
He has owned this posture where he loves his white shoes, but if they change color, that is fine, too. Most of us expect Pete to step in the strawberries, get all pissed, and then sulk back home and try to clean them off.
But he doesn't.
He keeps going.
And it isn't this sense that he continues walking and powers through the disappointment of no longer having white shoes. Rather, whatever color Pete's shoes now are, he loves it. There is no suffering or anger or tantrums because things are not going his way. Pete just keeps walking along with pure, unadulterated joy with whatever color his shoes happen to be. It isn't that Pete's shoes are no longer white, rather, there is an appreciation and excitement about the new color he has found himself in.
Because, although counter intuitive to what we might expect, his shoes don't have to be white. There is no color his shoes have to be in order for Pete to keep living his beautiful life. There is nothing that controls and dictates the presence Pete is able to have. Whatever happens to Pete, its all good. And not so because he numbs himself to these things that really bother him or that he just distances himself from everything so as not to get hurt.
It's all good because Pete loves his shoes white, but he also loves them red and blue and muddy and wet.
This is the posture that Pete puts on display; where nothing owns or controls him and there is no dependence dictating the quality of his life. Where there are no pre-defined categories or expectations for his shoes that Pete feels have to be met. He just finds the beauty in whatever color they happen to be. Because he hasn't attached himself to just one way things have to be, he is free to love every color that his shoes become.
Maybe we could say that it is a posture of open hands.
For most of us, we live life with closed hands.
Of expectations.
And assumptions.
Ways we've conceived the world and our lives are supposed to work.
We take some external object or 'thing' or person or idea and we close our hands around it as a way of securing something that will provide happiness and peace and joy and love. Because human intuition gives us a drive for the 'guarantee'. We want the comfort of security and safety and reassurance. We like to have some control in keeping the ground under our feet.
And it is this drive that pushes us to attach to things. So we clench our hands around them and slowly the dependence of that attachment builds and, naturally, then, we end up with a lot of things that we have to have or that have to happen a particular way; they are the assumptions and expectations and self-determined 'needs' that become engrained into our souls.
Which isn't Pete's posture.
Pete doesn't have his hands gripping some fiction in his mind that dictates the quality of his life. Pete has no cognition of how things have to be. Though he loves his white shoes, the love isn't rooted in or dependent on the color.
Because his hands are open.
Instead of clenched fists, it is the picture of palms facing up, where air moves freely in and out. There is a sense that something can enter into the open face of your palm and be there and exist, yet is also free to to exit as it needs. And this is the important distinction with open hands versus closed. When your hands are closed, you force the world to work within the rigid structures and patterns you've barricaded within yourself. Nothing gets out, but nothing can get in either. What you have in your grip is all you have.
The problem is that what happens when that thing you are dependent on, the thing you've limited yourself to, fails?
Or ends?
Or dies?
Your closed hands have forced you to be closed to the infinite flow of the world. You become blockaded within these expectations and assumptions you've developed about how the world is supposed to work.
Using our closed hands we build up walls and fit our limited experience of the world into them. Which then, unfortunately, becomes the only world we know. It becomes the very assumptions that we are then dependent on.
Essentially, our boxes are all of the fictions that we create as the 'right way' and our entire lives become based off of them.
Pete shows us that we don't need boxes.
That we don't need the fictions that so many people convince themselves of.
That we don't have to be dependent on anything.
Because for must people, their shoes absolutely have to be white. So when they step in a pile of strawberries it is like taking this box that they had created for their lives and shattering it to a million pieces. When things don't go along with your expectations of how they are supposed to go, it forces you to pry open the death grip of your closed hands and put the world back together that you thought you once knew.
But what would happen if you just didn't have boxes in the first place?
If you just weren't dependent on anything to start?
If your hands were just already open so that whatever happened, you were just able to be present and enjoy it for what it is.
Then, stepping in strawberries wouldn't be dreadful, it would just mean a new color for you to enjoy, a new experience in your story. If your hands are open and you aren't dependent on things, if nothing owns you and you aren't trapped in all of these fictitious boxes that you've determined for yourself, then when you're world gets turned upside down, it won't matter. Because there is no 'upside down'. There is nothing to turn. For you, getting turned upside down just becomes another way of being in the world.
It is the idea that you can only ruin something that you have a vision for how it is supposed to be. Otherwise, one color may end, but you are open to whatever the next thing is for your shoes. Stepping in strawberries doesn't mean the end of white shoes, it means the beginning of red ones.
Because when you don't live in boxes, you are free to experience the world in its fullness and in its possibilities with no expectations or ways things have to be.
This is the posture of Pete the Cat.
There is no color that his shoes need to be, just a vast array of possibilities and every single one of them is good.
Let us also learn to live with open hands, exposed to the infinite number of beautiful colors our shoes can become.
