In the long-ago year of 2019, when Seamus was the primum inter pares of a kindle of five kittens rescued from the backyard, he was the curious and certain one. He had no problem leaping onto ledges and nosing into the plants, no hesitation in chasing the red laser dot, and, above all, no reluctance in hanging out with the humans, whose company he seemed to enjoy. Today, nothing seems to please him more, as his handlers work from home, than jumping into the chair next to me (we each have a side-chair at our desks to accommodate whichever of our cats wants to bask in the sounds of keyboarding, monitor glow, Zoom/Teams chatter), lying on his side and letting me sneak my hand in between his hind legs and rest it against the pure downiness of his belly. Before long, he nods off. Seamus has a body that is, at the same time, lithe and heavy; to hold him is to hold something solid and “there,” an established “isness” irreducible and elemental, the “real.” He also has a temperament at once crafty and innocent, tricksterish and harmless, and seems to go through his days balancing the times he pounces on his catmates just to annoy them with a little gnawing on the plants, surveillance of the street from the mudroom window, rolling the ball of yarn, chasing the laser dot, and, of course, napping with a human’s hand on his belly. That belly. When my hand is slipped between his legs and rests on his belly, warmth and peace rise through me that clean out the sludge and scale of the routine and the obligatory. Interspecies camaraderie. Sentimental soliloquy about the pressures of the modern and the missed pleasures of the innocent. Living in the moment. And we’re done with the essay. Except that the hand on the belly is a much stranger event than that. Almost always, before he gets on the side-chair, he stands on his hind legs and, while resting his body on the chair-edge with his left foreleg, reaches out with his right foreleg, puts his right paw on my forearm and with the gentlest of tugs, nails out just enough to get a purchase on my skin, pulls me toward him. Only after he’s done this to get my attention does he jump up on the chair and arrange his body so that we can connect. I don’t know what he’s thinking, how he’s thinking, but it seems reasonable to interpret that he is making a choice based on a desire and has a plan to satisfy the desire. In the end, we both get what we want, but there is no oneness here because we are two separate sentient creatures signaling to each other and managing, based on outcomes, to think we’ve correctly interpreted the semaphore. The fact that there is no oneness here but instead a reach across a divide is what is so wonderful about the connection. So much of what underlies notions of inner peace or theology is the hope that, at some point, division and loneliness go away and with them the strife and angst they cause: a desire for unity with a side-order of the unambiguous. But what a distinctly dreary prospect. My hand on Seamus’ belly, like the cephalopod reaching out to the human diver in My Octopus Teacher, reinforces the idea that strangeness, and strangerness, is how we Homo sapiens ever learn anything about anything, and that without these encounters, or at least without enough of them, our brains lapse into figments and fantasies, infolded on themselves, giving birth to all manner of horrors. Figuring out what Seamus wants, and Seamus figuring out what I want, keeps me honest, or at least tethered to the earth, hemmed in by all the separatenesses around me and, because of the confinement, a much more whole and integrated person. The strangenesses of life keep our lives affiliated with the real. T.S. Eliot may have said that “humankind cannot stand very much reality,” but clearly it must bear some or else it will not be able to bear any. I prefer Thoreau’s gloss on what we need to bear to be able to bear anything: “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” Whether we like the strangeness that craving reality gifts to us is another matter, but clearly we must have it because with it comes the curiosity and wonder that makes any life worth the living of it.