Let it sit
how dried up cat food taught me an important life lesson
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Each morning, I scrub my cats’ wet food dish with a cat-shaped scouring pad my boyfriend bought me from Japan.
With harsh cuteness, I scrub against the dried, curled up chicken pieces that my cats left behind. I release streams of hot water from the kitchen faucet, watching it slide down the sky-blue ceramic dish as I scrub, while also attempting to do it quickly in order to be a good citizen and conserve water. This is also why I switched to a scouring pad from a plastic scrub brush with a suction cup at the end of the stick—it wasn’t getting the job done, leading to even more water loss!
Scouring was more thorough, but it still required me to use my nails to get the littlest bits off—until the other day.
The other day I thought to myself, why am I in a rush? What if I fill the dish with a layer of water and let it sit over the bits? Ironically, this “slowing down” was also an effort to balance between feeding the cats their breakfast while hovering the stove and making my own.
Slowing down to hurry up.
So that’s what I did. I filled the dish with a quarter inch of water and let it sit in the wet food dish as I sprinkled parmesan cheese over my over medium fried eggs and flipped my turkey bacon, all while adding a new Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice teabag in my Anthropologie cat mug (it’s my favorite, not just becuase my bestie gifted it to me for my birthday but beause the handle is actually the cat’s tail!) and grabbing a fork to eat my brekkie.
After arranging the eggs, turkey bacon, avocado, and blueberries on my plate and carrying it to my coffee table to eat while I turned on the TV to watch some Abbott Elementary, I remembered the lil dish sitting in the sink (and I heard Sonya’s meow for attention). It had been about ten minutes since I let it sit in the water, so I didn’t think the chicken bits would be that loose.
But lo and behold! I tilted the dish up from the left side and the water slide down with the most of food.
All I had to do was let it sit.
Not only did I save water, but I saved effort to scrub it (and the life of my kitty scouring pad!)
I couldn’t help but see this as a lesson...
When do I try to force clarity when I just need to let things sit?
I can’t count how many times I’ve asked myself, “What’s wrong with me?” after I was triggered or exhausted or stressed.
NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH ME. I just needed to let myself sit! And be! And not see myself as a problem but as a process, a marination, a rooting, a waiting. My little bits just needed some cushion to soften and loosen. To make space for the nourishment on its way to me.
It is my wish that whatever compelled me to let water sit in the wet food dish generalizes into my excited ideas and my triggered anxieties. My deep existential dread and dissociative numbness.
All of it just needs to sit in its bits for a little while.
When have YOU tried to force clarity when you just need to let things sit? Comment below.
I love this story and analogy, thank you!