Mosquito Lessons

Most of us live within relatively narrow perimeters and enjoy a small life. There is beauty and satisfaction in that smallness, partly because the least significant of lives can still have cosmic proportions for the meaning and purpose they offer. Thomas More, A Life at Work

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito. Bette Reese

Mosquitoes are the bane of Southern existence, followed closely by gnats. In fact, we even have an invisible boundary referred to as 'the gnat line' because the influx of their numbers increases mightily once you leave the cooler plateau of the Piedmont. In what I refer to as "BC" time (before air conditioning) the evening songs of crickets and katydids would be blended into the sound of the whirring attic fan. Sometimes added to it would be the dreaded high pitched whine close to your ear signaling the arrival of that terrible nighttime menace, the mosquito. Like a sniper, it would pine and wing around your head, the heat of your body drawing it like a magnet. There would be no rest unless you smothered yourself under the hot covers, or got lucky with a quick slap. A mosquito, doing what it does naturally, is a very powerful force.

There has always been a human fascination with all things bigger and better, but a good bit of recent research has begun to indicate what most of us already knew: we are at our best when we appreciate the small things in life. A few close friends rather than numbers of casual relationships, work that we are able to see an end result from our efforts, living in places where we feel a kinship and connection. These all require small boundaries of one sort or another and not necessarily all physical. Small boundaries allow us to focus in more closely and see more clearly what is before us and that careful attention, the art of noticing and caring about connections, is most lasting and significant on an intimate level. We can be carried away by political and religious causes, but the relationships we have with each other and our own lives remain the most essential.

It seems we start out wondering what we will do with our life? and approach the end asking what have we done? There is much food for thought there and an easy opportunity to devalue the significance of our accomplishments in between those questions. In those moments it may be helpful to be reminded the world is made up of all of us. All the little lives, going on everyday—working, loving, living as best we can, are truly the foundation of the world. Everything else happens only because of this strong and vast bedrock of everyday people building everyday lives. Ours are the most necessary part for life to go on and change for the better. The big sweeping events will come and go, but it is the small, carefully woven lives of all of us, that hold the fabric of life together.