I was making breakfast this morning when I found myself thinking about Pandora. During her last visit, she seemed quieter than usual. Nothing dramatic—just a little distracted. She sipped her coffee, stared out the window for a while, and seemed lost in thought. Normally, I wouldn’t think much of it, but then I remembered a phone call she’d mentioned the night before. Karen from work had called, and apparently the conversation hadn’t gone particularly well. Pandora said Karen sounded stressed, but she didn’t elaborate much beyond that. Now, before I go any further, I should point out that Karen is my coworker. The phone call had nothing to do with me personally, and as far as I know, it wasn’t anything more than a work-related conversation. Still, once a thought gets into my head, it tends to settle in and start rearranging the furniture.
John Mercer wandered through the kitchen while I was contemplating all of this and asked whether I planned on actually cooking breakfast or just staring at the refrigerator all morning. It was a fair question. Meanwhile, Mr. Whiskers was sitting by the window, watching the neighborhood with the intense focus of a cat who seemed convinced he was conducting surveillance. Every few minutes, he’d flick his tail and stare at something outside, which naturally convinced me that he knew something I didn’t. The more I thought about Karen’s phone call, the more I wondered if I was missing some important detail. Maybe Karen was stressed about work. Maybe Pandora was concerned about a friend. Maybe there wasn’t a mystery at all. Of course, my brain immediately rejected that perfectly reasonable explanation.
Instead, I started building theories. Perhaps Karen’s call was connected to some larger problem at work. Perhaps Pandora knew more than she was saying. Perhaps there was a complicated chain of events linking everything together. The problem, unfortunately, was that I had absolutely no evidence for any of those ideas. The entire investigation existed exclusively inside my head. Even so, I found myself replaying every detail I could remember, searching for clues that probably weren’t there. The longer I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I was overlooking something important. That’s usually the point where my imagination stops being helpful and starts working overtime.
John walked back through the kitchen a little later, looked at me, looked at Mr. Whiskers, and then looked back at me. “You’ve got that look again,” he said. Naturally, I asked what look he was talking about. “The one where you’ve convinced yourself there’s a conspiracy,” he replied. I was fully prepared to explain why he was completely wrong when I noticed Mr. Whiskers staring directly at me. Not out the window. Not at the neighbors. At me. The expression on his face seemed to say that John had a point. It was a remarkably judgmental look for a cat.
That’s when it finally hit me. Pandora had seemed a little distracted during her visit. Karen had sounded stressed during a phone call. Those two facts did not automatically add up to an elaborate mystery. There were probably dozens of perfectly ordinary explanations, and I had somehow managed to skip all of them in favor of constructing a complicated theory involving hidden meanings, missing information, and connections that existed only in my imagination. By the time breakfast was finished, I had reached a conclusion. Karen’s phone call was probably exactly what Pandora said it was: a stressful conversation. Pandora was probably just thinking about it. John Mercer was right. And Mr. Whiskers was judging me. Honestly, the cat was probably judging me the most.