I understand everybody gets bit by bugs and insects, but it seems like certain people are more prone to being bitten than others. Maybe people with a propensity to being bit were insects in a past life, and that explains the unwanted connection. They say only female mosquitoes bite, so maybe they’ve caught wind of the grievances women have against me, and this is their idea of justice. I remember one time at a hockey camp in Minnesota, my cousin and I must have counted over one hundred bites on our first night there. It looked like we had lesions or something. Whatever the case may be, with all the evidence at my disposal, I have concluded that bugs love me. A-ha! Perhaps the solution to being attacked by insects is to love them back. The problem is, however, that I don’t. At all.
There are people that have come and gone in my life. That is the case for everybody, obviously, but I still wish that I had the attention of a select few. The counter-argument to that would be for me to pay attention to them, but who am I to say that these people even want my attention? Am I to just intervene in somebody’s life whenever I see fit? Besides, if they wanted my attention, they would seek it, and because they don’t, then that must mean they don’t. Fair enough. It works like that, doesn’t it? We are less likely to get attention from the people that we want attention from the most. When this happens, I sometimes have a tendency to throw myself pity parties. “Nobody is paying attention to meeeeeee!” While that might be somewhat true, it isn’t exactly true.
This morning I went out to the backyard, sat underneath the tree, and began my meditation. I don’t know. When we think of meditation, we instantly, or at least I instantly, think of Gautama Siddhartha sitting beneath the Bodhi Tree. There is something about meditation in that setting that is more effective than sitting cross-legged in my bedroom with all my devices around. You come out of that Buddha-inspired meditation practice feeling like a new man, with newfound peace and serenity, but in my case, I come out of it itching like I am a crack-fiend just as well. Shoot a nuke down a bug hole, and you got a lot of dead bugs, am I right? Anyway, while I was incessantly itching all over, the thought occurred to me: “Well, at least something is paying attention to me.”
“Creation has paid the same amount of attention to an ant as it has to you.” It is not that I am not receiving attention from anybody; I am just not receiving attention from the people I want it from. I am getting plenty of attention if even just from a mosquito. What happens when I fixate my focus on one particular individual is that I completely miss out on all the attention that is already being paid to me, or I miss out on endless opportunities to pay attention to something or someone else. Look at His creation. Everything in this life has value if I were to just pay attention. Sometimes people will be paying attention to me (I want to say us, but I’m the one writing this, so me), but because I don’t like that specific person, I will treat them the same way I treat an insect. I’ll scratch my head as if their words are biting me and making my mind itch. Sure, I won’t physically swat them away, but I will dismiss them just as I would a bug. Why? Humans are funny. You know, it is not very often that we get paid attention to, but then we finally do get it, and we don’t want it.
Maybe I am late to the party in realizing that the phrase “so and so bugs me” is derived from bugs being annoying, but the point that I’m possibly attempting to make to myself is that I am not more significant in this life than even a mosquito. They say that if all the insects were to die today that we would have about four years left before we would all be in deep shit. If I am not more significant than a bug, or even less significant, who then am I to dismiss a fellow human as if they are a bug? A lot of this is easier said than done, though, right? Because obviously, we are going to like some people more than others, and it takes a lot of work to have the ability to immediately accept people as they are. But, if I cannot love bugs or insects, who are clearly head-over-heels in love with me, how is it that I can love a human back?
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