It occurred to me today that the ants have something to teach us.
I was big into the Dave Matthews Band back in the late 90s and early oughts. I was admittedly late to the party on this particular matter, but my brother and sister-in-law were very into DMB, and my wife and I started listening by proxy. Come to discover, the Dave Matthews Band had been responsible for some of the songs that I was really enjoying even earlier, songs that I’d never attributed to a particular artist before that point.
One of those catchy songs was Ants Marching. It was a very popular song, probably primarily because the melody was upbeat and fun. The lyrics, on the other hand, were a bit of a darker matter. The meaning to some of the lyrics seemed to be a condemnation of the human propensity toward mindlessly making our way through our days, without much thought or inclination toward progress. This was one of the things that I enjoyed about so many of the songs from DMB: they had some significance to them, besides being enjoyable musical numbers.
I’ve recently realized that I am guilty of this more often than I’d like to admit. Figuring out that we only have a certain amount of time in our lives, and that we ought not waste that time on just going through the motions of the daily grind, is a lesson that usually requires us to have a reason for reflection. The death of someone close will often do this for people, as it reminds us of our own mortality and the finite timeline that we, most of the time, would rather not think about.
For me, though, I think I might be having a bit of a mid-life crisis, as of late. This is also a common impetus toward introspection, as we look over a life half-lived –in our estimation, mathematically speaking– and what we might do, what changes we might make, to better steer ourselves into the future. The problem with the concept of a mid-life crisis is that it assumes that we have more time than we might actually have. For me to be having a mid-life crisis at the age of forty-four requires that I assume that I will live to be eighty-eight, give or take. Truth be told, I could get hit by a bus in six months, and my mid-life crisis should have been during my senior year of my undergrad.
Nevertheless, when I think of the DMB song Ants Marching as I’m writing this post, I think that maybe I have reached a point where I am no longer going to keep blindly doing the things that I’ve been doing, just out of some obtuse promenade through the rest of my days.
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My wife and I have been dealing with an ant infestation in our living room this past week. It’s only happened to us once before, in the almost eleven years that we’ve been in our current home, and the previous time was so long ago as to erase from our minds the solution that we used previously. So, we hopped on the internet and started googling things like “pet safe ant poison” or “diy ant remedy”.
What we ended up discovering, as to how to kill the little buggers, seems to have worked. As we continue to check the area where they were getting into the house from the outside world (our house’s original structure dates back to 1869, so needless to say, there are probably a million places where ants could come in), it’s been a few days since we’ve noticed any new ones coming in.
One of the things that we discovered as we were scouring the internet, looking for assistance, was that there are different kinds of ants (which we knew) and that some types of ants will only invade your home if you have something to offer. Sugar ants, for example, are specifically interested in human food scraps that might be laying around that they can come inside and steal, to take back to their homes for their own particular snack.
Now, admittedly, my family is not the cleanest family in the world, but we are also not the sloppiest family, either. We clean in the places in the house where we find obvious messes, and we (semi-regularly) engage in a cleaning regimen around the house, whether there are obvious messes or not. I would have thought that, all things considered, we were doing pretty well.
But the ants disagreed.
When we noticed them last week, we followed the line of them, from where they were getting into the house, to where they seemed to be going. They were heading to our leather love-seat. Since we were pretty sure that they weren’t looking for a soft place to rest their heels (do ants even have heels?), we decided to investigate the leather love-seat, to see what may have been of interest to the ants.
We found the mother load of food particles and dropped snack stuffs underneath that love-seat, crawling with little sugar ants. Let me tell you how much fun that was to clean up. Pieces of candy and potato chip parts and several instances of the snack that smiles back. It was a regular sugar ant buffet under that love-seat, and we had no idea.
Isn’t that how it goes? You are plodding along, thinking everything is alright and that you’ve got everything covered and then, BAAM! Something hits you out of a clear blue sky and you had no idea it was coming, or that there was even anything that you could have been doing in the first place to prevent it. I think, when that happens, the best we can do is to move forward with the knowledge we’ve gained, making changes to our processes, to prevent bad things from happening again (as much as we can ever prevent bad things from happening). As crappy as it is that we are sometimes stuck in lousy situations that we don’t appreciate, we should at least be able to appreciate the chance to learn.
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So, whether it’s a song about ants, or the actual creatures themselves, I think that ants have something to teach us. Maybe they can point out where we’ve forgotten to run the vacuum cleaner. Maybe they can point out how dull and monotonous a life of unrelenting sameness can be.
It Occurred To Me Today 