Sorrento, Italy – Today on the train to Pompeii, I heard a man from Southern Florida tell a Napoli local that it gets so hot where he is from that even the animals die from heat stroke.
As a matter of fact, a few years back, a black cat just up and keeled over on the hot pavement right in front of him. He went on to explain that he immediately submerged the heat afflicted animal in a nearby river where the cat was promptly revived enough to scratch up his bare arm somethin’ terrible.
Watching this man tell his bullshit story I could see that he believed every word was true. It was also clear that the train passenger he was telling it to didn’t speak english and didn’t likely care if the story was true or a complete fabrication.
But the story made me think about truth and its subjectivity.
It is entirely possible that the cat was just laying down in front of the man hoping for a scratch behind the ears and instead ended up a victim of near drowning at the hands of a South Floridian with a hero complex.
I’m on the Amalfi coast this week at a yoga retreat, so truth or Satya is top of mind for me. Yoga, asana and meditation, offer a path to seeing things as they truly are, without the layers of bullshit we as humans pile on. Witnessing and understanding things just as they are.
Maybe he really did save the cat, maybe it was just a grim misunderstanding. But getting to the truth is a life’s work and in the case of this man’s story, we will never know what exactly went down. So chalk this up as another of life’s great mysteries.
This article originally published on GroundingUp
