Life is Like a Trip to the Vet

Ron and I have two cats, Kili and Bear. They don’t look anything alike, even though they’re litter mates. They’re inseparable, curling up together, engaging in epic wrestling matches, and licking each other in an adorable bath ritual.

Wait, don’t go away! I promise I’m going somewhere with this and not just lapsing into a pet owner’s ramble about my cats. Just bear with me (ha!).

Last week, we took Kili and Bear to the vet for the first time. In the year that we’d had them, they’d never left our apartment, so they’re very innocent in the ways of the world. They like to stare longingly at the birds on the lake out the windows, but we think if they were actually loose in the neighborhood, they’d immediately get clobbered by the much tougher neighborhood kitties.

(But it’s a moot point anyway—we live on the third floor and there’s no way for them to come in and out of our building, so indoors they must remain.)

When we put them into their carrier, they didn’t immediately understand what was happening, just that they were suddenly behind bars and didn’t like it. Kili meowed plaintively all the way to the vet, and Bear kept an apprehensive eye peering through the holes in the crate.

Once released into the vet clinic room, they crept around to make sure no other animals were nearby, then huddled against me, fur puffed out and eyes wide. But they endured the exam and the shots and didn’t complain quite so much on the ride home. By the next day, they seemed to have forgotten the trauma, their purrs returning as they reclined together in sunlit patches on the couch.

…

When I go through a hard time in my life, I think of it as a trip to the vet. (See? I told you I’d have a point.)

We are to pets as the gods are to us. We provide our pets with what they need, though they don’t really understand where it comes from. We control the comings and goings of their lives—whether they encounter companions to play with, where they go and when.

Periodically, we take them places they absolutely don’t want to go. They complain and resist, and they never understand why such trauma as a vet appointment has befallen them. But through the appointment, we make sure that they’re healthy and we heal them if they’re sick. Although they don’t like it, it’s good for them.

So much happens in life that we can’t control and don’t understand. Sometimes we grow from it, and sometimes we wonder whether it was just rotten luck. But I like to think there’s a hand at work orchestrating it all. That when misfortune comes my way, it’s my own “trip to the vet.” I may not understand what I’ll get out of it, but I just try to trust that somewhere out there, someone’s looking out for me.