What I Learned About Our Cat, the Ballet Dancer

I’m a cat fanatic. My favorite YouTube station: Kitten Academy. My most recent purchase: two pairs of cute cat earrings. Best of all, I wake each morning with genuine delight because I get to share my life with this handsome fellow.

As an unabashed cat lover, learning a new feline fact is very exciting.

While listening to a recent episode of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, my ears perked during the “What’s the Word” segment of the podcast. The word was “digitigrade.” From my Italian language study it was no surprise that “digit” refers to fingers and toes. But then things got interesting.

Have you ever wondered why a cat’s knee bends in the opposite direction that a human’s knee bends?

The answer to this question is simple: a cat’s knee bends exactly the same way as a human’s. In all the years I’ve been ogling cats, I’d confused kitty’s ankle with kitty’s knee.

The anatomy of the feline leg clicked for me when I understood that cats (and their canine pals) are digitigrade animals. They walk on their toes, not on their feet like us plantigrade humans.

Kitty’s foot is perpendicular to the ground and he stands on his toes, not on his feet. It should have been obvious, but I was so deeply rooted in my experience as a human who stands on her feet that I was blind to the possibility of toe walking. It took a real shake up in perspective to realize that not all beings walk like me!

My handsome Siamese buddy trots around the house all day on his tiptoes. No wonder he moves with such swiftness and grace–he’s the ultimate ballet dancer! Thank goodness he’s willing to tolerate life with this plodding plantigrade, who loves him with all her heart.

What I Learned about Learning and Happiness

It’s the start of a new year, a time when beginnings and endings encourage us to step back and check out where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’d like to be. Today I’d like to kick off a new section of my blog called What I Learned.

Since 2014 I’ve kept a personal happiness journal (similar to a gratitude journal), modeled on my experience with the social media app, Happier. Back when I used it, Happier encouraged users to share three happy moments every day. Users could include a photo with their daily happy moments, tag each with a category, and, of course, participate with other members by appreciating what had made them happier.

When the social aspect of Happier became too heavy, I translated the practice to my private journal. Once I eliminated the strain of entertaining an audience and could just be myself, I found that journal jotting three things that made me happy each day paid huge mood boosting dividends for such a tiny amount of effort spent.

I also kept the practice of tagging my happy moments. Tags help me spot trends of what brings a smile to my face—and it’s not always what I expect. No surprise that my kitty, my hubby, friends, good food, and reading top my list. But I’m surprised how often watching a video makes my day (I used to consider myself a reluctant video watcher). Nor did I expect (as someone who patterns herself after a Hobbit) that going out would rank so high on my happiness list. Another enlightening entry in the top quarter of my happy categories is learning something new.

Throughout 2017 I searched for other daily journal jotting practices with effectiveness as potent as my happy moments. I wrote affirmations, collected quotes from philosophers, tried noting the successes and failures of the day, and typed out my values. But of all the daily practices I auditioned, only one stood out above the others in bringing more joy and meaning to my life. This practice happens to correlate with that last entry in the top quarter of my happiness charts. The only of the  2017 journal jotting experiments that survived as a regular part of my practice is: What I learned today.

What I learned about learning in 2017 is that learning something new every day truly does make me feel more positive about life. If I’m super excited to tell my journal a juicy nugget of knowledge learned that day, I believe it was a good day. Evenings when I struggle to dredge up something I can qualify as “learned” follow down days where I perceive myself as drug out, burned out, and more than a little defeated. Learning something every day is becoming critical to my sense of wellbeing, purpose, and joy. It makes me feel more alive. If I added up all the What I learned today entries and tagged them as HappierLearning, this category would make an epic climb up the happiness list.

Sometimes What I learned today is a cool fact gleaned from reading or a podcast. It can be a life lesson learned the hard way by making a mistake and falling on my face, or a truth I’ve recognized about myself. I love when What I learned today is an insight, a new perspective or experience. Or when a new connection sparks, and I have a mini breakthrough that lets me understand, just a little more deeply, the world around me.

I learned from my Happier experience that daily posting is not for me. But when I do learn something new that I’m excited to share, it would be great to have a place to write about it. So I’m starting a new section of my blog called What I learned. I hope a few of the things that have tickled me to discover may bring one or two fun aha moments to others, as well.