Setting Off Hysteria

by Joni Kamiya, Hawaii Farmer’s Daughter, July 18, 2019

Today my kids learned a lesson about thinking logically the hard way.

My oldest received this photo from her friend today. Being a cat lover and knowing that we have a ginger cat like this, she instantly reacted. Our ginger cat was no around and that lead to lots of drama.

“Mom, Taylor sent me a photo of this cat that was dying and I can’t find Lily. I think this is Her!” Kylie was crying and trying to talk.

“Well, are you sure?”

“I think it’s her! What do we do?!”

“I will be home soon.”

Then I started getting a frantic amount of worries calls from her that the cat had died. I knew for myself that the cat was not around at breakfast so it may have been her but I needed to figure out if that indeed was the case. Kylie was hysterical, unsble to think about a plan to find her. I told Kylie to check around the yard and walk down the street to look for her.

Within a few minutes, I am home and sure enough Kylie is in a sobbing fit, paralyzed by her own emotions. Meanwhile, Katelyn is all “it could not be me who let the cat out” but she was on my bed this morning. We start to do a logical search of the cat around the house.

We also had a plumber fixing our toilet while the lost cat drama was going on. The poor guy thought he might have missed the cat but said he didn’t see any pets running by him while he worked. I had my doubts that the cat had disappeared during his visit because they hide when strangers are around.

Sure enough, we could not find her but knowing how she hides, I was not convinced she was gone. While my middle kid went back to playing on her Kindle, my eldest was sobbing about the loss of the cat. We started talking about her microchip and my eldest thought it could be used to track her. When she realized it couldn’t, she started to get more emotional.

We sat there calming down from the realization that Lily may be gone and now able to speak logically about our next step. Then all of a sudden, Lily climbs out of her hiding place and Katelyn yells, “Look! There she is!”

Lesson learned that emotion stops our ability to think rationally about an issue and impairs our ability to develop a well-laid out plan to take the best course of action. That lesson is very pertinent right now with the issue of the protests. So many are stirred up emotionally but when you ask for their plan after the protests, they have no idea or thought about that. They aren’t thinking about the future unfortunately.

When Kylie calmed down, I asked her more about the photo. Turns out, that was taken a mile away from our home and when we looked at the details, it was clearly not our cat. Katelyn chimes in saying, “I didn’t think it was her because of her color and paws were not the same.”

It takes time to walk out of emotion and think. Thinking is way better than acting out. That is what I teach my kids because reacting may cause one to regret their actions. We have a frontal lobe to give us higher level thinking. More people need to use it in this day and age.

Lily is home safe.