The Animal in Us
I guess that title caught your attention. The more adventurous minds would go in the direction of “She’s going to venture into the steamy and raunchy” with the revelation followed by a tight grimace(!) Whereas the more rational will perhaps be thinking “Good grief, let’s see how she goes from shoes to animals!”
Let me allay all concerns. The title and image are designed by my under utilised creative mind simply because I love a spin. I quite frankly find the obvious quite boring. Intrigue is my thing, so that is what is playing out with this instalment.
For the record, the image headlining this post was a tribute to animals and the recognition of their beauty. Leopard print is the seasons vogue look. Lucky us, we can look fashionable by wearing clothes in the design of some animal print until a new fashion trend hits.
Animals of the 4 legged nature are living things that I love the way I love beautiful paintings or works of art. To be admired, appreciated, loved but maybe not cuddled. When I was growing up, we always had dogs, big dogs. Those days dogs were not quite pets but more an unpaid security service. We also had cats which we were all voraciously allergic to, but that didn’t stop us having them. One of my brothers absolutely loved and could not sleep without a cat. He slept with his cat cuddled next to him and his thumb in his mouth. For purposes of goodwill I will not go into my mothers take on that.
So the big dogs we had were all living creatures and as all living creatures do, they needed to eat and that food was processed and expelled from their body in the form of poops. Big Poops. My worst chores growing up were tied to those two natural functions. Cooking the extremely smelly food available those days, and shovelling the even more smelly poop from the lawn. Eeeew. To this day I struggle to cook Ugali, my mixing capabilities permanently disabled from those dog food cooking days. How I wish the manufacturers (or importers) of dry food were there then.
Having said all this, my daughters have helped (over) compensate for any shortcoming I have with respect to loving animal’s completely - this including and not limited to cuddling, sleeping with, kissing etc etc pets.
When my girls were babies I had to move to Durban South Africa to work. This is where I went on the journey of learning to unlearn my animal experiences. A favorite weekend activity was visiting this lovely animal farm where kids were carried on a tractor, learnt how to milk cows or goats, fed chicken and cuddled rabbits.
The significant moment of my commitment to animal adoption though was one fine day walking past a pet shop at the Pavilion Mall in Durban with the two toddlers. There were these three deliciously delightful pups, little powder puffs displayed in a play pen in the pet shop. Absolutely adorable. I was drawn to them and in my excitement to show my toddlers something new we went in and I had them hold them. That was it. We were not leaving without all or at least one of those puppies unless I wanted to shut down the mall with screaming and tantrums that could rival the malls security alarm system. So we settled for one pup, whom we aptly named “Yebo” meaning “Yes” in Zulu. My journey of nursing and bringing up pets began right then because dear Yebo cried every night for the first week we brought him home so I had to sleep with him. There were many other ‘Yebos’ in future but I will not go into that story so I remain true to my word count limit. All I can say is - so much for Yebo and all subsequent Yebos being the “Children’s” pets!
I say there were many other Yebo’s after this but I want to move to the other four legged animals we nurtured and their implication on my outlook to life. These other pets were called hamsters. Also exceptionally cute so I think by now you can figure what pulls my heart strings. The instigation is always mine as I suggested the idea of keeping hamsters. We started with Twiggy 1, courtesy of the show called the Power Puff Girls, then moved to Twiggy 2, 3, 4 , 5. We then moved to the era of Tiny. Tiny 1,2,3,4….. The last and most illustrious set of hamsters we adopted were Harry and Hermoine - my eldest was an avid Harry Potter fan, read every one of the sequels 3 times! Those last two hamsters we grossly misnamed as they should have been called Bonnie and Clyde. To this day I think there was a demon in them or they were the reincarnation of Houdini. How else would one explain how they could find their way out of their cage which had a foolproof lock and clasp? I would come into the kitchen where their cage was located and be shocked as I couldn’t see them in it. I would shake up the saw dust - nothing. Then in the corner of my eye I’d catch a little thing running across the kitchen floor, then the other. How the hell?
This story is really around those hamsters. These little animals. Part of the furnishings in their home cage was this wheel they would go into and keep walking. They would spend hours just walking on this wheel, sometimes slowly sometimes fast. I would after a long day sit on the kitchen table watching them going round on this hamster wheel with the thought in my mind “what drives them?” It was a road to no where. Those little hamsters never grew muscles from all that exercise, nor did they learn any new skill and they most certainly reached no where. It was just one of the things they did to fill their day, with the exception ofcourse of Harry and Hermoine, who refused to accept this limitation in their life.
It got me thinking how in life we get caught up in a hamster wheel. Doing the same thing over and over again with no real result other than filling a day, getting by. We think we are varying things by going slower and faster but at the end of the day we go no further than where we started despite all the effort. That animal in us says “keep going” just like the hamster. It took me a while to find some inspiration from those two hamsters.
If indeed life feels like that, get off that hamster wheel. Be like Harry or Hermione and find a way to open that cage or pull a Houdini move - whichever works. Explore the unknown even if it is for a while. Feel the exhilaration of running around the equivalent of a kitchen floor, with all the freedom, possibilities and risks the space present.
Find the (liberated) animal in you.
