a lesson from Fire Ants

This is a picture of fire ants I found nesting at a pavement. They do not seem as large as the ones I found before, so I'm assuming that these are 'younger' ones - some look almost translucent.

In any case, there is something to learn here.

Fire ants bite and it's rather painful when they do so and because they are rather large, the red bumps on our skin will be quite visible.

Our reaction would be to destroy them (as we destroy everything else) just so we protect ourselves. We always come first.

This is the lame truth. We are selfish creatures - we concern ourselves and consume ourselves with ourselves. There is no room for anything/anyone until we secure ourselves and it's not just in the monetary sense. Meanwhile, these fire ants - whose tree nest was destroyed twice, shifted and made another on the ground. They are survivors too - I'm sure Man, has hunted them down ever since I was a little girl and the building of apartments would have destroyed vegetation which is their preferred location. We are much larger than them and probably have a more complex brain. But simple as they are in their genetic make-up (no brain with a CNS), they know what survival is and they know how to adjust to the changing environment and limited habitat - everytime we destroy their nest, it's almost like they are experiencing a nuclear attack.

They move on and re-build their colony elsewhere - don't really come after us (no sense of revenge), because their little world is really all they have.

It's not about survival, they have no real knowledge of what that means - we do, yet we are unable to do more than just survive in our world. Instead of finding means to do better, most of us are just doing the bare minimum for ourselves. Had we been part of this colony, we would have been wiped out by now.

We get beaten up by bad decisions, mistakes and poor judgement - we are pushed to make rushed choices. We get depressed and irate in one swiss roll moment. We should take a lesson from them. No everything is within our control and as long as the 'bomb' didn't cause us to blow into bits, we should change direction and find a new safety zone.

For a few weeks now, I have felt backed in a corner, not being able to reconcile my bad choices and why it so. I was annoyed with myself because it wasn't choices that were out of my total control - circumstances may have prompted me to choose the way I did but that is not reason enough to okay the wasted years.

I spent a few minutes watching them - hurrying along the pavement - like nothing ever happened to their previous 2 nests on the tree. Perhaps sometimes it's best not to have an active brain - lest we over-think a situation. But because we do, I will try to make the best of it, by using it to get me to safer grounds.