It’s 11:30 at night, and I’m going to try to keep this brief. Because it’s been a long day. Because I’ve still got stuff to do. Because I don’t feel well. All week I’ve been fighting a sinus infection or something gross. And whereas it’s better than it was two days ago, I’m still coughing, hacking, and sneezing.

I’m not impressed.

This afternoon I worked for several hours cleaning out a friend’s rent house and, after hauling two loads of trash to the dump(ster), made a significant dent in things. After I quit for the day, I stopped by an Asian food mart to look for more kimchi, the fermented cabbage that (sometimes) contains the probiotic that helps my sinuses. I say more kimchi because I’ve already purchased three different jars this week. (One of them was five pounds.) Seriously, the stuff is taking over our refrigerator. Still, since what I have clearly isn’t doing the trick, I continue to be persistent in the hunt.

Persistence is really what I want to talk about tonight. When I got out of my car at the Asian food mart, I saw a real scrappy looking tabby cat. You know the kind, gaunt. It was hiding in between a couple cars, snacking on a bit of food that was stuck to the concrete. God knows what it was. Perhaps something that fell out of a customer’s shopping bag or something he fished out of the nearby trash. Anyway, he didn’t run away when I walked by, but he did look at me suspiciously. Like, Don’t come any closer.

Y’all, I’m not an animal lover (I’m an animal liker), but I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about this fella this evening. I mean, no wonder he was suspicious. He’s obviously had a rough life. How many of us are wary of letting others too close because–I don’t know–we’ve been hurt or are simply used to doing everything for ourselves?

But back to persistence. That’s what really struck me about this ally cat. Now, I clearly didn’t sit down and get his life story, but if he’s even one year old–and he looked older–it’s evident he’s a pretty resourceful feline to take what someone else would throw away and make a meal out of it. Surely we should be able to do the same. I’m not suggesting eating out of dumpsters. I mean metaphorically. Surely we should be able to take a bad situation and find something good in it, something that nourishes us. Get knocked down but get back up again. Put one foot (or paw) in front of the other and do the best we can in this moment.