Welcome, Ven a gozar!

When we pause long enough to look back over our life, we like to assess how we think we are doing. We look at our accomplishments and satisfy ourselves that we are somebody because we have completed some number of trials and tribulations successfully over the years, while others we choose to compare ourselves to have not.

We like to prim ourselves, fluff up our feathers, push out our chest, and strut around hoping someone will notice. If no one notices that is all right too, because we at least know how good we are. We know how well we have done in the face of adversity, overcoming obstacles and proving ourselves while other watched. It really does not matter though except to us and what we think of ourselves.

I stumbled upon a good analogy of our true worth some years ago. We have all heard about how we can stick our hand in a bucket of sand or water and splash it or move it around and shape it to our liking. Of course we know when we are all done and we remove our hand, it is like we were never there to start with. My observation is from a different perspective

I was watching an ant hill a number of years ago and I saw what our real importance is through the ant colony. If you have ever watched and ant colony at work, you know they have there set trails they follow initially when leaving the ant hill. In the morning as the sun warms up the colony hundreds of ants follow trails out to some end where once upon a time a lucky ant found a food or water source.

Usually the food source has long been forgotten and once the ants reach the end of the trail they start foraging in what appears to be a wandering pattern. If they have particular destinations in mind, I have not deciphered how they work. So out away from the hill there are all these ants working away, walking all over trying to find food for the colony.

At the nest there are other ants whose job it appears to excavate new tunnels. You see them walking out one of the tunnels to somewhere at the edge of the ant hill with a tiny pebbles in their pincers, or maybe a clump of dirt. They walk out near the edge, drop whatever they are carrying, and walk back in to do it over again.

I am sure there are many more ants who each have individual jobs in the colony of which I am unaware. As the day progresses, all the ants go about their tasks and the whole colony enjoys the benefits of the communal work. As I watched the ants working away, it dawned on me that even though they were working towards a common goal, they were not in any apparent way attached to each other.

When I removed an ant from its task whether the ant was foraging, hauling tiny pebbles from far below, or smoothing the ant hill and possibly reshaping it, the loss of a single ant was not noticed, or so it seemed. In fact unless I disturbed the ground there was no notice of an ant disappearing from its appointed task.

In reality so it is with us. If something appeared and took one of us from where we were sitting reading this, not too many people would notice that we were missing. After a few hours, it would become noticeable to those close to us we were not around at that time, but for the majority of the community, the loss of a single person is really a non event.

So when we are looking back over our accomplishments, and puffing ourselves up and feeling important, we also need to take a few moments and reflect on the truth. Are our accomplishments something that really make a difference to our community, and improve the quality of life for everyone, or are our accomplishments of a singular nature, in that they only benefit us?

Hopefully by the end of our lives we will accomplished many things that stand out in our mind as something that was really worth doing, and not a something that was important only to us. If we spend our lives doing those things that are only for us, we are like the single ant I removed from the ant hill. Nobody will really notice the difference, and our feeling of self worth will feel a little hollow to us.

On the other hand, if we some memories of how we made life better for the community or someone in it, we have fueled fires that will continue to burn in peoples memory’s long after we are removed. These changes need not be something that changes the very foundation of civilization, but may be something more humble and simple. Generally the more humble and simple whatever it is we do, the more it is appreciated by those people we do it for. Making life better for others, has a bonus of enriching our own life.

Comments (0) Apr 08 2008