Most mornings, at an hour when I should still be asleep, my cats jump onto my bed and announce that their world isn’t right and what am I going to do about it?
Their mews mean one of two things: “I need to go outside” or “The food bowl needs attention.”
Either way, I’m doomed to get up.
More times than not, I will discover the early morning cry is about the food bowl.
Upon inspection, I often see that all their noise is not about an empty food bowl — but that between the two of them, the cats have eaten a vertical path through the pile of niblets to the bottom of the dish, exposing a small circle of clear plastic.
For awhile I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. The bowl had plenty of food in it — all the cats had to do was start eating from a different angle. But they would circle around it as if it not one morsel remained.
Apparently in cat world, this small exposed circle triggers a signal that the bowl is actually empty even when it’s not. Nothing will convince the cats otherwise. But with a quick shake the bowl suddenly appears full again and they are right back into it as if I’d just poured a new round of fresh nuggets.
This got me thinking about the holes in my life that trigger me to stop moving forward. Where do I allow silos to blind me into thinking things are one way when they really aren’t? What are the signs that tell me I need to make some noise and either get help from someone else to shake the bowl — or shake the bowl myself?
If Marcus Mariota didn’t shake the bowl after losing to Arizona in October, he might not have won the Heisman this year.
If Dr. Seuss didn’t shake the bowl and allowed the 27 rejections of his first book, To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, he wouldn’t have experienced 300 million sales of his books, become the 9th best-selling fiction author of all time, or impacted billions of readers young and old worldwide for generations.
If Oprah Winfrey didn’t shake the bowl and moved past being fired from her job as a television reporter because she was “unfit for tv,” millions of lives around the world wouldn’t be as enriched as they are today as a result of her insights, generosity and influence.
Could a quick shake of the bowl be the secret to pushing past what’s got you frustrated, confused, or just plain stuck?
I don’t know, but what have any of us got to lose?
