Sid and Archie - Part 1: a Tail of Two Mindsets

How our beliefs shape our lives and the way we live them – plus a green interlude – and cats.

Welcome to the weekly free post from Something More. I’m Caroline Ferguson – mindset trainer, therapist and your companion on this hike through the high and low country of mindset, personal leadership and exploring a life that matters (plus other stuff that comes into my head, and yes, this is one of those posts).

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Archie and Sid. Their names make them sound like:

1. Terrorists

2. Rival rebels in a punk band, or

3. Characters in a Carry On film.

And it’s true, they do have enough character to be any or all of those things.

They are, in fact, cats – and female cats at that (‘the girls’, as I call them). It’s quite fitting that I’m writing this on 29th October – National Cat Day here in the UK.

Archie, left, and Sid on the right. Photo by Caroline Ferguson

A bit of background

On my nomadic adventuring through some of the wilder corners of the UK, I regularly look after creatures while their people are away. Luckily for me, the pet-parents for whom I’m currently deputising travel a fair bit.

I say luckily because, apart from the affectionate and eccentric entertainment provided by the girls, for a couple of months of the year I have the incredible privilege of living on the shore of a sea loch on the west coast of Scotland. The 360-degree view of water, hills, forests and sky changes every minute as the light shifts. It’s so heart-stoppingly beautiful that I can’t help running outside several times a day to take a bath in all that wonder.

I took this photo one afternoon a couple of weeks ago. This is pretty much the view from my bedroom window. No filters or editing, it was even better in real life.

Golden hour at Loch Fyne, Scotland

I know, right?

The loch is edged by a rare fragment of temperate rainforest, home to gnarly trees with mosses, lichens and ferns clothing their limbs. Every rock, every fallen branch, every scrap of tangled forest floor has its coat of emerald fur. And everywhere there’s the sound of water: trickling, splashing over rocks or ‘lapping with low sounds by the shore’ as W.B. Yeats so beautifully put it.

Scotland suits moody weather, which is just as well. Temperate rainforest requires a maritime climate (shorthand for ‘rains a lot’) to thrive, but this place is far too beautiful for me to be bothered by a minor detail like two metres of rainfall a year.

I spent 25 years in London, glimpsing slices of sky sandwiched between brick and concrete. Even though I left the city for a more rural life over a decade ago, here at the loch I feel the last residues of the old, urban stress being released from my cells.

I don’t often return to locations I’ve already visited on this meandering adventure around the UK but I can’t get enough of this beautiful home, its spectacular setting and, of course, Sid and Archie. This is stay number four and I’m already teed up for number five in January. Hurrah!

Enough of the green interlude, back to the cats.

Every day these two teach me a little more about mindset in action. They absolutely prove the maxim, “we are as we think”.

Anyone who might want to argue about whether animals do actually think obviously hasn’t spent much time around them. How they think is a matter of fascination to me. Do they have a form of language that enables them to think conceptually? Or is their thinking phrased experientially, as emotion, sensation and appetite? Or does it play out in images and visual memories, like a home movie running in their heads?

• Watch a dog dreaming: it’s obvious he’s imagining – or reliving – an intensely vivid experience. The twitching limbs, paddling paws and urgent little whuffs show us he’s running flat out and barking in full cry in his dream.

• Observe a cat making her way towards something she wants – usually a warm lap or to satisfy her curiosity. She’s alert and focused. The decisions she’s making about her route are quite strategic.

There’s definitely thinking going on – and thinking has consequences.

Meet Sid

Sid is a tabby with a sweet round face and the plushiest of plush coats. She’s the boss around here and she’s hilarious.

Sid

Sid’s sense of entitlement is, shall we say, robust. I realise that’s a characteristic of cats in general, but Sid’s absolute certainty that the world is there to serve her is impressive. If she fancies a snooze in the cat bed that her buddy Archie happens to be sleeping in, despite there being another perfectly good one next to it, she simply climbs in and stands on poor Arch until she gives in and moves to another spot. Sid makes sure everyone knows where they fit in the pecking order.

Like I said, entitled.

Bed time is particularly interesting

I’m a side-sleeper and Sid sleeps on my bed, folded into my tummy. If she fancies a change of scenery, say the other side of the bed, then rather than quietly walk around me and tuck herself into the small of my back, she’ll stomp up and down the side of my body, from knee to shoulder, chirping loudly (her excellent bird impressions also include coos, trills and quacks of outrage) until I oblige her by waking up and rolling over. She has to have that prime tummy spot; the small of my back simply won’t do.

We repeat this game several times a night. I have to admit that, while I love feeling the warm weight of her against my stomach, the stomping thing… Hmm, not so much.

Sid is also insanely curious and must always know what’s going on. Last week, while making a batch of brownies, I opened the pan drawer to take out a baking tray. I turned my back for ten seconds to rinse it, then went to nudge the drawer shut. I don’t know what instinct made me pause and bend down to check the inside of the drawer first, but I’m glad I did. There was Sid’s little face peering back at me. She’d not only jumped in, she’d hopped over the rear section of the drawer and got herself wedged between the cabinet and the wall. I had to practically dismantle the drawer to get her out.

Of course she quacked at me…

Sid - stuck behind the pan drawer

When I shared this bit of hilarity with her pet-parents, they told me they lost her recently and turned the house upside down searching for her. They eventually found her in the T-shirt drawer and reckoned she’d been trapped there for at least four hours.

When I’m writing at the kitchen table, Sid will leap onto my keyboard and investigate what’s on the screen, tail in the air, anus exactly 11 millimetres from my left eye. She’ll pause there and give me an eyeful (thank goodness cats are fastidiously clean) then thrash my face with her tail when I suggest she gets off the keyboard.

Sid can be bossy but she can also be beguilingly sweet. Her tummy fur is so soft and blonde and spotty that I sometimes have no choice but to bury my face in it when she’s demanding a tummy rub. She just about tolerates this, though only briefly, and then she quacks “Get a grip, woman!” and wriggles away.

When Sid doesn’t get what she wants, she makes her displeasure clear with wild tail-twitching and pissed-off bird noises, followed by a haughty exit. Ten minutes later she’ll be back to have another go. You have to admire her optimism.

Here’s my interpretation of Sid’s belief about her place in the world:

I know what I want and I believe I’m entitled to get it. When life doesn’t deliver, although annoying, it’s not the end of the world. Not getting my way doesn’t mean I’m inadequate, just that it didn’t work this time. I’m resilient and resourceful and I can always come back for another try.

This belief that the world is hers for the taking, but she can cope and adapt if it doesn’t deliver, shapes her emotions and behaviour. It gives her the confidence to aim for what she wants and the ability to recover quickly when this daft human fails to deliver.

Now meet Archie

Ah, beautiful Archie, with her tortoiseshell colouring, fine-boned face and pupils edged with aquamarine. This girl purrs like a locomotive.

Archie

Where Sid is straightforward, Archie is intense and complex. Where Sid is confident, Archie leads with caution and a touch of anxiety. She’s restless, nervy and tends to be submissive (not to be mistaken for weakness).

Archie’s had a few misadventures over the years that have left their mark. She had cat flu as a kitten and as a result her health is a bit fragile. Each year when the cold, damp weather sets in, she comes down with chest and stomach problems. I had to take her to the vet a couple of days ago for antibiotic and steroid jabs and it took me two botched attempts and an unholy scramble to get her into the cat carrier. What with that, the needles and the indignity of the thermometer, she’s only just forgiven me.

Last year she was lost for several days (not on my watch, thank goodness) and was eventually found locked in the woodshed. She’s been noticeably more anxious since then, which is hardly surprising, poor baby.

Archie has been dying to join Sid and me at bedtime but my room is so clearly Sid’s territory that she hasn’t dared chance it. Instead she’s gone to sleep alone each night in her little cat bed in her pet-parents’ room, but not before breaking my heart by prowling the house for an hour, making little mewling noises as she tries to pluck up the courage to join us. I’ve spent more than a few hours lying on the floor by her bed, comforting her.

And then she bloody did it!

Halfway through my current stay, Archie finally found her courage. One night around 2am, she slid into my room in the pitch dark, took a giant leap onto the bed – and landed on fast-asleep Sid and me. As you can imagine, fun and games ensued.

A week later, we’re still working on harmony at bedtime but we’re getting there. Pleasingly (Archie for the win!), I now have two bodies to navigate when I’m commanded to turn over.

Oh, and one thing I find meltingly sweet is that sometimes Archie likes me to hold her hand until she falls asleep. Ahhh…

Archie holding hands

Both of the girls crave physical closeness, though it shows up quite differently.

While Sid will secure attention by climbing onto me and treating me as her personal furniture without a second thought, Archie spends a good part of the day trying to coax me into the living room so that we can sit on the sofa together. When I eventually comply, which tends to be in the afternoon when Sid is upstairs having a snooze, Archie spends at least 15 minutes roaming around the sofa in a state of restless excitement, trampling the blanket and my lap, and ramming her face into my hand for head cuddles with such vigour that I worry she might hurt herself.

I want to say to her, “It’s OK, sweetheart, shall we skip crazy today and get on with the stroking and purring?”. But no, we have to go through it each time. It’s almost as if she feels she needs to earn the right to receive love by being demented for a while.

Eventually she does settle down, next to me, not on me, and even then she won’t fully relax. This is because she’s keeping an eye out for Sid.

Archie finds Sid’s easy ownership of humans mystifying and painful. Although the girls get on reasonably well most of the time and will happily curl up together for naps, they’re both quite territorial and jealous when it comes to humans. There’s only one of those in the house at the moment and they don’t always share nicely, though sometimes they do surprise me.

When Archie has spent ages dementedly earning love, and Sid marches in and simply hops onto my lap, it sends Archie into a torment. She thumps off the sofa and roams around making little distressed noises and clawing at the furniture and carpet. It’s sad to watch and it can take a wee while to console her.

Then, of course Sid gets jealous and quacks…

Here’s my interpretation of Archie’s belief about her place in the world:

I must be able to earn and keep your undivided attention – I MUST! Because if I can’t, it’s end-of-the-world awful, I can’t cope, and it means I’m rubbish.

Poor Archie. It’s agony for her when the world doesn’t give her what she believes she must have.

So what’s the point of telling you all about my delightful charges?

It’s to illustrate that the beliefs we hold have consequences.

These two mindsets, Sid’s and Archie’s are common in humans too:

• Sid has a robust belief that she’s entitled to have what she wants. At the same time, she has a realistic acceptance that the world doesn’t always deliver. If that happens, it doesn’t diminish her value, her resilience or her chance of getting her way another time. It’s a pretty healthy way to think.

• Whereas, when Archie’s rigid insistence on earning and receiving attention isn’t met, it leads to her catastrophising and feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. Not a brilliant outcome for her.

These girls demonstrate well what I teach my mindset training clients about our most sabotaging beliefs, and how we can learn to think in a realistic, flexible and helpful way. We’ll explore these ideas more in future posts.

Archie and Sid, almost relaxing.

Let’s see how the girls and I get on tonight – with luck I may catch a few more hours’ sleep than the scant three I managed last night.

Until next week, cheerio from the three of us, and please do keep exploring your “something more”.

x

PS - You can read part 2 of the Sid and Archie story here.

PPS - You may want to take a look at this post which reflects on how much our environment can impact us.