I found a dead kitten today. Four or five month old brown tabby, with cute ear tufts and a brown nose. I'd heard a cat in distress a few weeks earlier, and looked for it, but couldn't find it.

The part of me that wrote a lot of poems about death and cycles and fatalism would spew some rubbish here about how nothing really dies, and how the kitten is now food for insects who will be food for song birds who are food for other kittens, and so on and so forth. Or maybe it'd talk about causality, and how the kitten had to die as a result of the laws of physics and the position of the stars eight billion years ago. Or about balance, and how dark things are needed to provide contrast to the bright ones.

The part of me that had to bury a beautiful young cat is upset that I didn't look harder, and angry at my asshole neighbors who can't be bothered to spay or neuter their cats, or to take care of the kittens.

That first group of reactions is a lot easier emotionally. It's also way less likely to prevent other kittens from dying alone and afraid, meowing for help that never comes.

People feel things for a reason. Ideologies that try to blunt those feelings are not good. If life gives you a choice between passively accepting horrible things or getting fucking angry and doing something to stop it, choose that second one.