cleaning my carpet

I rented a carpet cleaner today. You see I have a cat that is older then Yoda, 16 or 17, I've lost track. He spends a lot of time sleeping, like most beings his age do. Then he'll rouse himself, head to the bathroom where I keep his litter box and food. He has trouble with both. The food he doesn't keep down, and the litter follows him from room to room. Markings on the wall, foot prints in gray outlines on the bathroom tile, the toilet seat. He won't drink from anything but the toilet. He's taken over that bathroom, it can seem like a walk on the beach going in there. The 'clumping' litter sprayed around, flecking the tiles.

It's because he barfs up 1 in 3 meals, not to mention the hair balls, and he loses hair like someone undergoing chemo, that I needed to clean my carpet. The splotches of yellow were everywhere. (I do have a spot cleaner, lest you think I'm not a total slob)

I dragged all of the move-able furniture out of the room, picking up the plastic mat under my office chair, I do a lot of work from home. That was when I noticed what the carpet used to look like. The rest of the room was sort of beige with brown specs. Under the plastic mat it looked white with brown specs. I had not noticed the accumulation of dirt before.

Looking at the stark contrast, it was very different, the color under that mat, I wondered how I could not notice the change? How had this day in and day out accumulation of dust, dirt, kitty litter, dog fur, cat fur, even the horses contribution gone unnoticed? Then I wondered how many other things in my life had been covered over by the day to day grime of living life, and I just never noticed. If I could lift some metaphorically mat in my life and see things how they were to my younger self, before the dust and grime of day to day living over all of these years had been trampled into the very warp and woof of my life.

What would I see? would it be so different? Am I so different? or have I not changed? This evoloving/mutating/metamorphis that I think I've undergone what if it isn't reality? Wouldn't that really suck if I'm no different?