Today, I wrote on my facebook wall: “Could anyone send me a baby animal pic? I think Bubble tea’s not gonna do the trick. Bumped on the same-shape wall a few too many times.”

The last bump was with someone I work with, repeatedly saying: ‘I’ll do X,’ but actually just putting X on a list.  For some reason, I’ve been affected by the delays, slackness, slow responses, or just plain committing and never doing, which I’ve experienced recently. I guess, running a non-profit on passion and conviction that long-term benefits are significant, as I do, makes me vulnerable to disappointment – many people just do the job they get immediate money for, and not very well at that. I always forget.

Beside, this comes in a context of battling for funds among multiple bodies – never quite fitting their criteria – and encountering the self-centredness of constituted grant givers when allocating public money. Working in a small structure where I’m accountable for everything, I have become sensitive to bureaucratic slack and disengagement. And indeed, I have taken on some of it myself – if they don’t do their job, why should I do mine – and neglected things I should be doing. Add a layer of guilt and meta-guilt to the mix. Slack may be structural. Am I any better? Who am I to blame?

Three days ago, I bumped. I was tired, and at some level I wanted to give up the whole shebang – Marco Polo Project, the Festival I’m trying to organise, even life in Australia. But at some level, I knew there may be milder solutions. And so – wisely? – I just put everything down for a couple of hours, and got myself a cup of bubble tea, taro with pearl. Sometimes, all you need is a moment off, giving the brain time to find its balance. It worked in that instance.

Another problem today, another encounter with ‘I haven’t yet but it’s on my list’, and I found myself in a daze. So, I thought appealing to a sense of communal support – and watching pictures of baby animals – would help. And it did. Within seconds, I got a smiling cat, a puppy wearing a dinosaur suit, and a youtube video of an armadillo playing with a pink plastic bear. It made me laugh, it lifted my mood, and got me drafting this piece, which is better than the daze.

Why do baby animals help? Why do we find them ‘cute’, and why does it lift up our mood to look at them? Some of it has to do simply with youth – any baby represents a future potentially different, better than the frustrating present. Although that baby cat is likely to turn into the usual grumpy adult – it still has the potential to be that perfect being, which will exactly match my expectations. Some of it has to do with animals – we forget about the human world, its anxieties, duties, pressures, and complex web of politeness. The baby animal expresses unrepressed emotions, joy, surprise, love – or at least we can project those on them.

And maybe, there is a meta-reason. When you’re frustrated at the narrowness of the world, how nobody will go that extra mile, not even that extra centimetre, how everybody’s busy, grumpy, depressed: well, someone had enough energy to take a baby animal pic, and enough generosity to share it on the web, making it available to others. And so, the sheer existence of baby animal pictures, their availability, testifies that the world has more to it, that we do have an extra little bit of energy to share, that we can go beyond. And I guess, that’s why I’m feeling better now.