Yesterday, while getting ready to drive to the movies, a ladybug landed on my windshield.
I have a rather solid truce with the bugs in my house. As a rule, if an insect is not bothering me and is not threatening to crawl/fall on me (or one of my guests), I leave them alone. Otherwise, I exert my rights as a brute and remove it.
Watching the ladybug crawl across my windshield, I moved the car out of park and took to the road. Despite hitting 70mph, the little bug managed to hold on. It would slowly scuttle forward an inch or so and then stop. The whole time, I fought the impulse to turn on my windshield wipers to remove it (a method decidedly lethal for the ladybug). I don’t consider this impulse to be particularly evil or bad. I wouldn’t have blamed another from knocking it aside. So why didn’t I do it?
It’s for a very silly, yet personally important, reason. If there were beings out there that was looking at me the way I was looking at the ladybug, I would hope they wouldn’t wipe me out without a more meaningful excuse beyond unthinking whim. So the ladybug survived and a few minutes before I arrived at the movie theatre it flew off.
By the general standards of our society, I am very bad man. My morals are more then a little suspect. I have trouble staying in lines. And yet, I can say without unconsidered pride, that I get along better with my fellow human beings then most.
Those rules I do have, those unwritten ideas that I live by, I work hard to uphold; many people who purport to live by society’s standards do not actually abide by them. And if there is anything in this world I detest, it is hypocrisy. But as much as I despise hypocrisy, we all live with it. No one escapes it. The least we can do it be honest about it and when possible try to live by rules you know you can abide by.
One of those rules I know I can live my life by is simple: Do no unnecessary harm.
When I make decisions that will affect others, including people I don’t know, I always balance my desires against this rule. Am I unnecessarily going to harm another with my choice? (defining what is necessary and what is not is an entirely separate topic).
Wicked, cruel, and amoral – Yes. But also deliberate, intelligent, and with fevered reason.
How very zen. I’ve had the same debate myself with bugs and windshields.
When I lived out in the deep mountains of Western North Carolina, I would run into so many lightning bugs at night that I quit traveling between dusk and 2 am. I would rather wait them out than be saddened by the hundreds of glowing smears across my windshield.
They are, after all, trying to mate. My windshield is no way to go out.
Found your link next ours on Eros and Logos. I am beyond words.
Have enjoyed my visit very much indeed.
Shall have DQ link you today.