A couple weeks ago Kinky Boots, our 10-month-old kitty, accidentally escaped and I was reminded how scary hope is. Kinky’s jailbreak was accidental in that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing a lot of the time. She still has an instinct to bolt, or flinch with her whole body, when something happens that surprises her. A lot of things surprise her.
On the afternoon of her accidental escape Harry is on the front porch picking up a package, the front door open behind him. Kinky has never been interested in What Lies Beyond The Door. But this time Harry turns to see Kinky in the doorway, tiny gray paws over the threshold. She’s outside for the first time since she was rescued at 6 weeks and brought to the cat shelter. Harry moves to pick her up, which is a surprise to Kinky. She bolts across the porch, across the lawn, and Harry loses sight of her.
The fear is chaotic in my chest. She’s so small. She has a tiny, squeaky meow so we won’t be able to hear her even if she tries to call to us. She doesn’t approach us unless we’re on the couch. She’s never been outside our house before so she won’t know how to find her way home. A very large and healthy coyote lives in the slough behind our house. My heart falls down the chasm, straight from “fine” to “despair” in a few seconds. I’m shocked how fast this happens. My brain is screaming that it’s futile to look for her. She’s gone. Gone as in never returning. Hope is a calculation based on available information. In this case hope = 0. The odds are against her survival.
We search anyway, of course. We roam our yard and into the neighbor’s and behind our house. I’m imagining her tiny, furry body in the coyote’s jaws. I try not to. I keep pushing this image away but the only image that replaces it is her tiny, furry body shaking with fear under a dark porch somewhere. I’m so certain of the outcome I cannot imagine her prancing out of the bushes toward us. I have no hope.
After a while I tell Harry I need to do some work and I go back into the house. Harry is out of his mind and I know he won’t be coming back into the house until there’s absolutely no other choice. It might be midnight before he reconciles what I already understand. It’s true I need to do some work but I’m also aware I’m using this as a distraction to stop feeling so sad and upset. These are very uncomfortable feelings and I’d like to ignore them for a minute.
It's been almost three hours since we last saw Kinky, and Harry comes into the house to start making dinner. What else are we supposed to do except go on with our lives? He asks me, “Won’t you go out and look for her?” I don’t know how to tell him it’s too painful. The looking is too painful. Looking for her requires hope and hope itself feels like broken glass under bare feet.
But I think about this and realize I have to be able to say I tried to find her. It’s too soon to give up completely. There’s still plenty of daylight. Maybe she’s up a tree. Maybe she’s across the street behind that house and she just needs to hear the sound of a spoon clinking against her food can. Maybe she’ll come out.
I’m not saying I rustled up some hope, but maybe there was a tiny glimmer. I kept it at arm’s length so it wouldn’t infect me with its rising heart, its light step. I didn’t want to feel the devastating crash of disappointment when my hope was demolished, so I only looked side-eye at it.
A man is walking by our house with a friendly, happy golden retriever. He sees me with the tin can and the spoon and I tell him we’re looking for our cat. While we say sad things in our driveway near the street his dog lunges at the bushes at the base of a big tree. A tiny flash of hope kicks at my mind. The man asks if I want his dog to sniff for Kinky. A few seconds later he leans over to peer into the bushes and says, “Yep, there she is.”
I see her there too! I see her little gray face and her eyes are wide and terrified. I see her! The joy in my throat almost suffocates me. The man drags his enthusiastic dog down the street and it takes us another ten minutes to capture Kinky as she bolts to our front porch (she knew where to go!), then the woodshed, then another hiding spot. But we get her inside and shut all the doors and it’s almost an hour before she stops shaking.
I’ve been wondering at myself, at how quickly I gave up hope that we’d find Kinky alive. It reminds me of when we were in Tonga and things were finally going ok after weeks of equipment failure and struggle. It was really hard, then, to let hope back in because I knew the effort to rise from disappointment was beyond me. I was tapped out. In Tonga, based on the information available to me, it was easier to assume the worst, to expect more challenges, than to be hopeful things were going to be ok. This might be familiar to you. Hope can be painful. Hope can be hard work.
Here's the other thing about hope, though. Hope is a fast-track to resilience. Being hopeful means being open to disappointment. When we choose hope we do so knowing we might be crushed. We check our resilience reserves. How much hope can we wager and still rebound from it if things don’t go as we’d like? A little hope? More?
Sometimes hoping is a fool’s effort. We know when we shouldn’t hope for something. That’s part of resilience too, knowing how to protect ourselves. That’s what I was doing when I had no hope for Kinky’s survival.
But sometimes hope is the only thing keeping us going, and the strength we get from hope can move us through truly difficult times. That’s what I finally stepped up to in Tonga. I needed hope more than I needed to protect myself from disappointment.
Becoming a stronger, more resilient person requires these terrifying expeditions into hope. It requires this calculation based on available information. Whether you choose hope or not, your resilience is getting a workout. Both choices are right at different times. Kinky’s jailbreak taught me so much that next time (heaven forbid there’s a next time) I predict I’ll let hope fly straight up to the sky and swoop around until she reappears with tree sap on her paws. This wager is a little less expensive now. Hope = 10.
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My cats all have AirTags on their collars. It’s not GPS tracking but the battery lasts a year. If one were to get out I could at least try to make it ring to find them. It also gives me a “last seen” time which is helpful. Technically it’ll ping any iPhone in range if I put it in lost mode.
I am so happy to hear the prodigal Miss Boots is now safely back in her snug harbor after sampling the excitement and mysteries of the mysterious Great Outdoors. It is always nice when a story has a happy ending. Fortunately, you had the services of a neighbor's cat-sniffing dog, who was more than happy to oblige and determine her hiding place. Then the 'game was on' as she scampered from one likely hiding spot to another before her 'shore leave' was cancelled and she was placed back in protective custody. While it was an interesting exercise in Hope, it failed to enlist the services of her twin sibling, Faith. Anyone who dabbles in the Stock Market realizes, Hope, by itself is not a viable strategy. While it is possible to have hope without faith, it is impossible to have faith without hope. While you had hope that your extended adventure on the murky, treacherous waters of the Great Pacific would end successfully, you also had to have a lot of faith in the reliability of the stalwart boat and that all its related complex equipment would continue to function properly during the long voyage. Hope is often described as a feeling or expectation and desire for something to happen and an optimistic outlook on the future. On the other hand, Faith is a more confident belief in something not based on proof, but a strong trust and conviction in a positive outcome. Both are important in different contexts and can influence how people approach life and challenges. Hope acknowledges that there is always room for uncertainty and change while faith is grounded in beliefs that are seen as absolute. Where faith expresses a fact about the present, hope is directed at a future state of affairs.
Now that Kinky has tasted the pleasures of freedom, she might focus her attention on becoming an 'escape artist' and take every opportunity to see what other adventures await outside the closed door. I think you drastically underestimate the skill and abilities of the feline species. After a two week bonding time in her new surroundings, those GPS coordinates are firmly locked in her data bank. She knows exactly where the food, water, warm bed, comfortable surroundings, affection and attention lie and exactly where to find them. Cats use telepathy, intuition, earth forces and 'cat sense' to navigate by, all of which are far superior to anything humans have come up with so far. They know exactly when it is time to get up, eat breakfast, brush the cat, when you are working on the blog so she can sit confidently on the keyboard, where the litter box is located and where the best places are to take an afternoon nap. They have a high response to treats when called and when they can expect the tuna fish water drained off a can of tuns fish opened for a sandwich. It is like the Ambrosia of the Gods and they can smell it from amazing distances. Having had an assortment of indoor/outdoor cats, I can vouch for the fact that they understand 'cat doors', navigating the neighborhood, where their house is located, when it is time for dinner and when to keep you company while you are working. Cats are free, independent and resilient spirits, have been for thousands of years and live on a different plane than humans. They are sent to us to try and teach us to be a better species, which is daunting work, yet they persevere. You don't 'own' a cat. They are only with you on loan and will go where they get the most attention, care and affection. The next time Miss Boots launches out the door to explore the 'bounding main', try calmly sitting on the porch, expect that the storm will subside and she is close by, add a little faith to your hope, call her expectantly and maybe open a can of tuna fish. She will always return to a snug harbor.