We’re contagious creatures, you and me.

I don’t mean in that way, although we’re certainly that too. Stay home; wear your mask; protect the vulnerable; remember we’re all vulnerable. Etceteraaah.

But today I mean we’re contagious like cats are contagious, for good and for ill.

When you’re hard on yourself, you make it easy for everyone around you to be hard on themselves.

When you exude peace, you infuse peace everywhere. (Want to feel powerful? Just try being the non-anxious presence in the room. Seriously, try it.)

And when you are a glorious goofball, you lift the entire room like a one-person tank of laughing gas.

Of course, by one-person, I mean — in most cases — one-feline.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the clowns are our greatest sages right now — and perhaps always, Shakespearean-fool style. Without the tireless ridiculousness of our oddballs and outcasts and unselfconscious acrobats, where would we be?

(I can answer that personally. I would be curled in fetal position in the teensy patch of sunshine in the room, mumbling Mumford and Sons songs and eating too many Handi-Snacks.)

But our silly sages aren’t content simply to shake us from our melancholy. No; they want us to pass it on, to allow ourselves to be infected by the “idiocy” that is real wisdom.

Next time your cat engages in an epic battle with her own tail, get up and dance madly.

Next time your cat chases a big ball of nothing across the room, flail about with free-spirited abandon.

Next time your cat makes you laugh or relax or settle into the great wide peace that never really leaves us, reach out and squeeze a hand or pinch someone’s nose or put something absurd on your head. (Empty Cherry Zero cases work magnificently and make you look like a kind of carbonated Pope.)

Give in to the goofballery, kittens. It just may be that silliness saves us.

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