Bug Me

As a kid I used to love watching insects. Diligent ants walking their neat trails, firebugs who stick their backsides together in mating season, metallic-coloured dragonflies, jesus-like water striders, the list is endless. A few weeks in summertime the outside garbage can standing next to my granny's garden gate was alive with white fly maggots and those were some very fascinating observation-days. And although I did like all these tiny flying, crawling, scrambling, buzzing creatures, I wasn't reluctant to swat one in case it bugged me. In most cases that would apply to flies, ants, tiny beetles, wasps and mosquitos. If it happened to be outdoors, I would hold a funeral and make a little pebble-gravestone for the poor dear. When I moved to the big city in my teens, naturally, crawler encounters decreased. So whenever I was outside on the balcony or in the park, and a stinging (mind you) insect would approach me, I'd either act extremely fidgety or just run. Have you ever tried killing a horsefly with one stroke? It's about as effective as wanting to saw through a rock with a nail file. Then, after a few years of soul-searching and agreeing on the terms of the universe and everything, I started to really appreciate the different life forms, however tiny. So if a bug bugs me, it really doesn't know that it does and who am I to take it's life on a whim. It's very useful to know that, however superior you appear to yourself as a human, you don't have to take advantage of your size and just relax on your fellow we-all-belong-to-mother-nature insect friends. And if you do, you won't be irritated if something is flying up in your face. Just be cool, the wasp'll be too. And if it's getting too personal, just gently shoo it away. (Although somehow that doesn't seem to work with mosquitos...oh heck, leastwise something to advance.)