Miss Mandie

My fellow inhabitants at The Forest

I have an ant problem in my place. Well, not so much a problem, more like a fully fledged, army-style invasion of the little creatures.

Usually I can live in harmony with them, but in all honesty, my Buddhist aspirations are challenged when there are so many of them as its rather easy to kill them with a mere swipe of the cloth on the bench. I don’t mean to…I just want to clean the kitchen bench and it’s so hard to avoid them.

Anyway, this morning the invasion in the garbage bin was enough for me to realise I was hopelessly outnumbered.

Not wanting to be responsible for an ant holocaust so early in the morning, I placed the bin outside. I figured that once they realised their earth had moved and the food source taken away, they would respectably move on to greener pastures.

But when I went to check on them about a half hour later, there were still hoards of them scurrying around the bin.

Which begs the question…why?

Considering the size of the change that occurred for the bin-dwellers this morning, they were practically transported across the other side of the world, with no map of where they had landed, and no way of knowing where they were going to sleep, where they could get food and what fate had been dealt to the remaining members of their ant family left behind in the kitchen.

In other words – pretty bloody huge stuff just occurred for them.

So as I sat and ate my breakfast, I pondered why some of them had moved on and others remained in the bin.

It crossed my mind how these ants reflect how we humans respond to change in our life. When things are shaken up and our worlds seem to collapse and morph and change without our prior approval/permission, we either get on with things or we stay stuck in the past, circling around in an abyss of denial/resentment/ remorse/insert your chosen emotion that doesn’t help you move forward.

I even went and banged on the bin a few times to try and get them out, along with a few squirts of the organic chilli/garlic spray that seems to work on getting the grasshoppers off my vege patch.

But still some of them remain in the bin.

My only option after this will be to get the dreaded swipey cloth and I can’t guarantee they will make it out alive.

Thankfully for us our inability to move on when things change isn’t as dramatic as losing our life at the hand of a swipey cloth (well, you would like to hope not or global warfare has taken a dramatic turn) but it was food for thought for me this morning…

[Ed's note: hours after I wrote this post, I went to collect the bin and lo and behold, all had moved on (well...except for the few that the chilli spray got the better of). Seems the swipey cloth can rest until another day. Yay for avoiding mass ant murder this morning!]