To Pant is Human, To Purr is Essential.

Answer Your Cats Question Day.

January 22nd has a way of sharpening my senses. I become hypervigilant, as though the air itself has learned a secret and is waiting for me to notice. Officially, it is Answer Your Cat’s Question Day. Unofficially, it is the one day of the year when the veil between worlds thins just enough for feline emissaries to step through. I am neither a dog person nor a cat person—if anything, I believe the world already belongs to cats and that they ought to be left alone in their natural habitat, unencumbered by our leashes, diapers, and sentimental projections. And yet, every year without fail, one arrives. Sometimes metaphorically. Sometimes, as legend would have it, straight from the catcombs.

This year’s arrival occurred while I was midway through my daily Katazuke ritual, tidying my physical space so that the without might reflect the within. Order, after all, is a form of quiet prayer. As I aligned books and cleared surfaces, I picked up a parcel sent by a friend. At that precise moment—because cats respect timing if nothing else—a soft, declarative “meow” announced herself.

Miyabi Neko had entered the room.

She was elegance made visible: grey fur, white paws placed with deliberate precision, and grey-green eyes that carried the weight of centuries. She looked down at me not as a pet might, but as Neko Jotei herself—the Cat Empress who once decreed that only humans require names, because cats already know who they are.

“Do you know what you have?” she asked, her voice calm, incisive.

“A gift,” I said, reasonably.

“Open it.”

Inside the parcel was a pair of sweatpants, designed by Sadie Kemhave of Cherry Blossom—intended for my movement classes, practical yet thoughtfully made. I muttered, half to myself, about Steve Jobs and how his eternal jeans-and-black-turtleneck uniform had rendered designers jobless. Miyabi Neko flicked her tail, a gesture that conveyed both dismissal and pity. I had, clearly, missed the point.

She fixed me with that gaze—one that suggested she had seen civilizations rise and fall, litter boxes invented and improved—and began her lesson. It was not meant to be a history lecture, yet she allowed me a glimpse of history anyway. Sweatpants, she reminded me, were born in the 1920s, when Émile Camuset of Le Coq Sportif stitched them for athletes. Loose jersey fabric, unrestrictive by design, created for freedom of movement. By the 1980s, they had left the track and claimed the streets, embraced by athletes, hip-hop culture, and anyone who understood that comfort could be a form of resistance. Utility became rebellion. Rebellion became fashion.

But this, she made clear, was merely context. The essence lay elsewhere.

Sweatpants were not the death of design; they were its distillation. Just as Steve Jobs reduced his wardrobe to a uniform in order to free his mind for more meaningful decisions, sweatpants reduced clothing to its core truths: comfort, function, and a quiet, unassuming elegance. Designers were not jobless. They were timeless. They adapted—just as cats have always adapted, without ever surrendering their dignity.

Listening to Miyabi Neko—Shibui Neko now, the understated cat—I realized that if I stopped being catty myself, I might admit that Neko Jotei had been instructing me for years. In 2019 (To Err Is Human, To Purr Is Feline), the lesson was individuality. In 2021 (Purr-sonally Speaking), it was freedom—rejecting leashes and reclaiming dignity. In 2025 (Purr-fect Reflection), it was mastery: being a cat as a metaphor for calm authority and self-respect. And now, in 2026, Shibui Neko offered the next refinement. Wisdom, she suggested, lies in essentials. In sweatpants. In uniforms. In removing the frills that distract us from what matters.

Answer Your Cat’s Question Day, it turns out, is not about me answering anything at all. It is about being answered. This year, Shibui Neko’s question—“Did you know yesterday was Global Sweatpants Day?”—was not trivia. It was philosophy in disguise. Sweatpants, Steve Jobs’ uniform, and feline wisdom converge on the same truth: elegance is not found in excess, but in essence.

Cats know who they are without names. Jobs knew what he wanted without closets full of clothes. Sweatpants know their purpose without sequins or lace. And perhaps I, too, might learn to know myself without clutter—tidying my space, tidying my mind, and letting the unnecessary fall away.

So I catalogue another lesson from the emissaries of Neko Jotei: individuality, freedom, mastery, and now, essentials. Each January 22nd, the cats remind me that wisdom does not arrive with fanfare. It arrives quietly—in the soft folds of sweatpants, in the steady repetition of a black turtleneck, in the composed dignity of a single meow.

And if I may indulge in wordplay, perhaps that is the final secret. Life is best lived when we can purr with contentment and pant with ease. The sweatpant, after all, is the garment that allows both—stretching like a cat, breathing like a human, and walking that fine, necessary line between whimsy and wisdom.