Litterboxes and life lessons (updated)

One of the things I love about my friend Kara Edwards is her ability to take different sorts of life situations, from worm poop to bee stings, and as she tells these stories on her blog, draw some valuable lessons for both life and business from them.

In some private correspondence with Kara, of which I’ve been able to take part, she’d discussed some challenges she and her husband were facing with one of their cats. Without recapping all of the various details (Kara can do that on her blog if she wants to tell you about it. Update: And she has!), the cat was acting out of control and Kara was at her wits end what to do about it.

She took the cat to a holistic vet to whom she’d been recommended and at that office received some interesting information that has made a profound difference in the situation. The answer, it seems, was in the litterboxes. Adding one more, on the other floor of the house, removing the covers from them and changing to a different kind of litter and no longer using liner sheets in the boxes. As Kara was describing all of this to us in a recent update as part of our private correspondence, she closed with this comment…

Who knew litterboxes were so important??

As I looked at that question, a thought popped into my head that I just had to send. Here’s what I wrote…

Kara,
The first thing that popped into my pea-sized brain in answer to this question is: think about what sort of impression it makes on you when you’re visiting someone and they don’t have a clean, tidy bathroom for you to use? I mean, I know cats aren’t human (I’m sure they’re convinced they are the superior species!); but it seems reasonable that this kind of situation would be important to every creature.
I suppose the larger application is that when we do things for our own convenience, we’re seldom serving the needs of (clients? family? friends?) others.

I guess reading Kara’s blog has influenced my way of looking at the world.