For the recent several nights during meditation I have been remembering a time when I was very small, maybe around 8? We live in a very hot place, and we went outside to get in the car to find that there was a dead cat in the back seat. I didn't feel much at the time. I tried to touch it, but it's claws were up in the air and that scared me. I told my mother there was a cat back there and she looked, and I think I only realized it was dead after my brother said so, and we verified it. I don't remember much about the cat. It may have been our cat, or a neighbor's cat, or a stray cat. I think it was either a stray or it was our cat. But I seem to remember, I think the previous day, I opened the car door and a cat jumped in. I couldn't get the cat out because it wouldn't let me touch it. So shut the door, and looked in for a while, thinking it would let me let it out when it realized it was trapped. It got frantic and started looking around, so I opened the door. But it still wouldn't come out. So then I shut the door and left, angry at the cat, figuring that was it's punishment for being stupid, or something along those lines.
Well, being 8 years old, I must have forgotten about it until the next day. It was hot, and the car gets really hot inside. The cat must have died of dehydration and/or heat stroke. And if that is really what led to the memory of the dead cat, then I must have had forgotten by the next day. I didn't think of feeling sorry, or what the cat may have gone through, until my mother mentioned the "poor cat". And the the gears started turning, and I think "I'm supposed to feel sorry about this, right?". So I try to feel sorry, and I remember it was odd to not feel much, just shock. There was no crying or strong emotions, just a constant low recognition of sadness, and when everything else was quiet, there was this dim sadness, seeming to want to bubble up and release, but never quite able to. But the sadness didn't seem to be directly associated with the cat, more it seemed to be a dark cloud overhead which never rained, but always cast a shadow. It's as if the cat event shocked me and unburied and old tomb.
I seemed to recognize at the time that my actions leading to the death were entirely the process of my normal self; I was not any different when I shut the car door from how I was at any other time. It seemed to shock me that my selfishness was powerful enough to cause me to kill a cat. I don't remember talking about this to anyone, because firstly I didn't know how or what to say, and secondly I was afraid of what would happen to me if I did.
The big question that seemed to occupy my mundane life at the time was whether to be selfish or considerate. Depending on my mood at the time, I could choose to be angry and self-important, or to be considerate. The future was open either way because my actions didn't have much of a direct effect on my life. It didn't matter much, and so I didn't have a vested interest in either action. So at the time of choosing it was a very clear choice. To an extent it depended on my mood at the time, but the choice never occurred automatically. It was always made consciously. I wonder what happened to change this. I'm guessing some sort of cognitive decline having to do with stress, mostly of school (I was very troubled and troublesome in school), and maybe food. It crossed my mind to simply leave the car door open and come back later when the cat was gone, but I made a conscious choice at the time to appeal to my ego. The difference is this time, it had profound consequences.
Going into school I had a very potent battleground to test my actions out on. I never made a strong choice between selfishness or consideration, because I found that when I was considerate, I was always taken advantage of, and when I was selfish, I felt bad and and wanted to be good for my friends (although the idea seemed to be lost on them).
The great vast majority of strong memories I have are of other people hurting me, for their own amusement or gain or angry self-importance in whatever way. I remember very few times when I deliberately hurt someone else out of either selfishness or just for "fun", and if I did I always felt bad for it (but strangely enough, the feeling was always a subtle discomfort, never overpowering, just enough to make me uncomfortable).
I am not very old, only 17, so not old enough to have a lot of really bad experiences I guess. Most important events in my life I have given the same treatment. There never seemed to be enough evidence to support a specific way of living, and in different situations the rules always changed. The right action was by far not as clear as the adults seemed to want me to think. I always felt spite, as I wanted to live the way I wanted to and the adults always seemed to do more damage than good to my life, as far as I could see. Their solutions were always more complex than my own, but never seemed to be any more complete as an actual solution. Just ways of getting by the hard parts of the moment, even though nothing was actually solved. This caused endless arguments between me and elders, because I never believed what they were telling me, but at the same time I couldn't describe to them why. Sure I could do things their way, but it never seemed to achieve practical results in my interpretation; the proof was not in the pudding.
This memory seems to be coming in endless variations. I don't know how much of it is real and how much of it is modified after the fact, after thinking about it occasionally over the years and imagining what I might have done to change what happened.
