A particularly long and stressful day when everything happened to need immediate attention and when every single task had to follow Murphy's Law (if something can go wrong, it WILL), had me desperate to relax and wind down by the end of it.
Reading a book was out of question. I was too stressed to even read, come to think of it. Mindless iPad games did not do the trick either and hence I found myself take a walk when the boys had dinner. Halfway through my walk, a cat startled me by jumping out of the mini-tree on the pathway and we both looked at each other straight in the eye. Neither of us broke the gaze, and I actually liked looking into the clear eyes of the cat. It would be presumptuous of me to say that the cat communicated something or that it showed me a large depth. Naah....
All it made me think of was that animals are colour blind. They do not see colour. They completely miss out on the blue sky and green grass and pretty flowers and everything else. I assume they see things in blacks, whites and greys? But then, a cat sees much better in the dark than we can ever hope to. It can see in the dark, so what if its all grey? A bat can emit sound waves at a much higher frequency than our ears can ever comprehend. A dog can smell things that we cannot. Our intelligence helps us understand that there are things we do not see, hear, smell. But that will never replace the experience, will it? Maybe we are built only to see seven colours and their combinations and not more. May be there are more colours. Yes, we know about infra red and ultra violet, but we do not see them anywhere do we? And may be there are colours of a totally different dimension than below red and above violet? In which case, we don't know what we are missing? Just like the cat will never know that it cannot see colours.
This train of thought humbled me and so it happened that the eyes of a stray cat did what no other activity could. I went back home, my normal calm self.
Reading a book was out of question. I was too stressed to even read, come to think of it. Mindless iPad games did not do the trick either and hence I found myself take a walk when the boys had dinner. Halfway through my walk, a cat startled me by jumping out of the mini-tree on the pathway and we both looked at each other straight in the eye. Neither of us broke the gaze, and I actually liked looking into the clear eyes of the cat. It would be presumptuous of me to say that the cat communicated something or that it showed me a large depth. Naah....
All it made me think of was that animals are colour blind. They do not see colour. They completely miss out on the blue sky and green grass and pretty flowers and everything else. I assume they see things in blacks, whites and greys? But then, a cat sees much better in the dark than we can ever hope to. It can see in the dark, so what if its all grey? A bat can emit sound waves at a much higher frequency than our ears can ever comprehend. A dog can smell things that we cannot. Our intelligence helps us understand that there are things we do not see, hear, smell. But that will never replace the experience, will it? Maybe we are built only to see seven colours and their combinations and not more. May be there are more colours. Yes, we know about infra red and ultra violet, but we do not see them anywhere do we? And may be there are colours of a totally different dimension than below red and above violet? In which case, we don't know what we are missing? Just like the cat will never know that it cannot see colours.
This train of thought humbled me and so it happened that the eyes of a stray cat did what no other activity could. I went back home, my normal calm self.
Hi Aishu,
ReplyDeleteyou are right. we don't miss what we never had.
the realities of life do calm your mind.
Raji
You managed to say this so succinctly...
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