Resolved:

1) To get more riboflavin
2) To take Orion to a Mumford and Sons concert
3) To finally, truly, deeply understand the soul of the cat

Well, two outta three ain’t bad.

If you spend any amount of time wombling around the interwebs, you’ve spent the last week getting chattered at by every possible spin on the New Year’s Resolution.

Resolutions are bad.
Resolutions are good.
Resolutions are ubiquitous.

Even the crankiest resolution-proof curmudgeons can’t completely escape this tide. It’s not really that we all want to lose 40 pounds eating bacon in one hour, or dump out our entire bucket list by December. It’s just that there’s something infectious, enchanting, and deeply, deeply compelling about the idea that we can be new.

Better than “new,” really — we can be what we know we were meant to be.
Whatever that is.

Resolutions are about the story we want to tell about ourselves. Our large-brained, anxious-minded species thinks a lot about the kind of creatures we want to be. This is often — always? — different than the creatures who make our on-the-fly choices, the choices that make us what we really are.

Cats, as usual, are different.
Cats resolve nothing, wring no paws, waste no sleep wanting to be anything more or other than they are.

Yet we shoehorn them into our oughts, making resolutions to which they’d never agree: this year BUBBLES WILL LET US DRESS HER UP LIKE A LITTLE GIRL! This year SPUMONI WILL LET US PICK HIM UP AND CARRY HIM AROUND THE SUITE! This year JACKIE WILL NOT ATTEMPT TO EAT A HUMAN WHOLE!

Or, this year, INDIE WILL BE A GLOWING ORB OF GREGARIOUS GLEE!

To be honest, if Indie had morphed into that glee-orb, she’d surely have been adopted last year. Her beauty is infinite; many adopters are open to older cats; hyperthyroidism is her only “thing.”

But Indie is not desperate.
Indie will not act desperate.

Indie was never the one who’d romp to visitors like a Golden Retriever puppy, never the one to angle for the limelight.

And so the lights shone elsewhere.
And so Indie was content to wait.

If Indie were a human, you and I might have seen fit to give her advice. “You need to put yourself out there, girl. The future’s never going to roll out in front of you right where you are. Give it a little effort. Slap on some lipstick. Play the game. Resolve that this is YOUR YEAR.”

To which Indie, Dowager Countess-style, would simply say, “Resolutions do not befit a lady.”

Good news, kittens: Indie can put all those resolutions with the lapsed gym memberships from 2014.

You guessed it. She’s getting adopted…exactly as she is.

When Indie’s adopter arrived, what she saw was what she got.
What she saw was Indie. Unvarnished, unpretentious, unworried Indie.
No veneer. No false advertising. Neither razzle nor dazzle.
Just the cat she knew she would love…forever.

And so it is that the light tilts towards the quiet cat with the poet’s soul, the Dowager’s age, the still waters that run deep as a thousand years.

We’ll never, not this side of the veil, fully resolve our noisy songs into perfect harmony. But, as usual, we can benefit from the feline patience that knows the truth.

What’s real is worth the wait.
This year, I’m resolving to wait and wonder…and receive.

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