We have a cat named Julio. We adopted him while living in Dubai. He's an Arabian Mau, and he's completely insane. At this point, he has three or four lives left.
We essentially rescued him when he was only four weeks old. My wife bottle-fed him multiple times a day — he was too young to have been taken from his mother. We had a scale and would weigh him before and after feedings to ensure he got enough formula. It was like having a baby.
Julio was showing signs early on that he was going to be a one-of-a-kind cat. He started climbing out of his little cage by six or seven weeks. He was talking vocally to get our attention. He would bite our ankles to get picked up and held. Then, slowly, his nine lives started to disappear — through a sliced paw, a terrifying lung compression under my son's foot (we bawled in the vet parking lot), and a bee sting that turned his paw into a club foot overnight.
Most recently, his nemesis Wilson — our older cat who hates Julio with a passion — attacked him badly, giving him a puncture wound on his left back leg. We made an infamous vet run. He needed strong pain meds, had to be put under ketamine, and the area had to be cleaned and shaved.
For five days after, we kept saying how sad it was to see him just lay low, not wanting to navigate the house. We kept saying how weird it was that he didn't want to play. After all, Julio is a cat who wants to be at the party. He wants to be the DJ, the bartender, and he wants to socialize. To see him just lay around was tough.
Then, on Monday afternoon, he started talking again, biting ankles, wanting treats, wanting to fight Lou the Goldendoodle like he always does. Julio's energy was back, and we were thrilled. "Oh, thank god he's back — but he's nuts again," I said to my wife. Her response?
"Funny how your perspective shifts."
She's right. I complain about Julio a lot, even though I love him to death. He's wild, he's in your business, he talks all the time, he wants to play, he bites ankles, he jumps on the counter. For five days, I prayed he would bounce back. The second he did, I was already calling out the behavior.
Perspective is a weird thing. We're always wanting something we can't have, don't have, or think we should have. If we have a Hyundai, we want a BMW. If we went to Hawaii, we wanted the Maldives. If we have one dollar, we want two. The list goes on. But sometimes, what we already have is exactly what we need. The chaos, the noise, the things that frustrate us — they're also the signs of life, connection, and presence. When they're missing, we feel the absence more deeply than we ever appreciated the normal.
Julio reminded me of that. His madness is part of our rhythm, and when it disappeared, the silence was deafening.
So the next time you start to complain about something or wish things were different, pause and ask yourself: are you actually unhappy with the situation, or are you just uncomfortable with the reality that things aren't going exactly as planned? When you slow down and take inventory of what you have, you might realize that what you thought was a problem is actually a gift.