My little ant friend

My heavy steel capped boots thumped weightily on the walkway between site offices. The large ants walking across the path scattered as the thunder from the boots reverberated through the concrete. I don’t know if ants can see and react as quickly as other insects, such as a fly; which seem to be able to sense the incoming swat and quickly escape away. The two ants on the next pavement caught my attention, the ants were a few centimetres apart from one another and heading in the same direction.  As I approached, the vibrations already had the ants walking slightly erratically, but then as the shadow of my boot signalled the impending crunch, one ant successfully dodged the boot but the other ant jumped, right underneath my already falling boot. And, his fate was sealed. The death of this little, fragile ant stuck me, as had he kept walking along his original path, he would have naturally avoided the footfall. In that very moment, the contemplation of his reactivity and doom plunged me into depths of thought and metaphor, regarding our own human blindness in life. Is it true that we cannot ever know what will happen next? If we cannot clearly see the entirety of the situation, with the world in all its vastness, complexity and interconnectivity, then we can never hope to control any outcome, at best, all we can hope for is a subtle influence. I started questioning how much time I spent planning, strategizing, thinking; the cogs whirring inside my head rather than moving, being productive, creating. All I can do is follow the signs, trust in life, enjoy the process and let go…