Relative to most chores or projects, there is ordinarily a hard way and then an easy (ier) way to accomplish your objective.  Obviously, in every instance strive to recognize the easy (ier) methodology before you begin the task.  This will save you both time and frustration in the end.  One of the telltale hallmarks of natural intelligence is the ability to quickly ascertain the maximus way to reduce any given task down to its barest essence.  Witlessness, on the other hand, manifests in the opposite direction:  Performing a task over and over and over secondary to rote memory, precisely in the manner it was performed the first time and every time thereafter, never seeking or even thinking of novel techniques that might somehow streamline the process and thereby free up additional time that could henceforth be spent on pleasurable pursuits.  In the end, isn’t that the chief goal all of us are striving for in life—Maximizing the time we have available for purely hedonistic pursuits—but with wildly mixed success owing to disparate methodologies?

Understand:  There is never a “perfect” time to do anything, nor will there ever be.  Perfection doesn’t exist in nature, thus why should one expect it to exist in circumstances?  The best anyone can ever hope for is a “right” time to attempt something, when most if not all of the conditions attending a situation are aligned in one’s favor. That is when you should act; that is when you should pull the proverbial trigger.  But if you are an obstinate fool and  insist on waiting around until every one of those aforementioned conditions is in perfect alignment, I can hereby guarantee that you will die first.

Why?

By Frederick J. Blahnik

The baby housefly was uncharacteristically blunt.

“Papa, why do we pester the humans so much, especially when it’s highly dangerous?  Why, just two days ago Uncle Ish got crushed to death on the humans’ kitchen table when he allowed his natural caution to lapse for a mere few seconds!!  Wouldn’t we flies be a lot better off if we just left the humans alone and focused instead on landing only on objects that are edible and taste good?!”

The elder housefly bristled at this suggestion.

“Absolutely not, Young One!!!  Pestering humans is something that we houseflies have been doing for millions of years and it’s built into our very DNA!  It’s an activity that you should take great satisfaction in doing and then proudly pass it along to your own offspring some day too!  Harassing humans endlessly and unmercifully is something that is integral to our core being, Young One; it helps define what we houseflies intrinsically are and why we were placed here on Earth in the first place!!!”

The baby housefly cowered under this verbal onslaught.

“Gee, I didn’t know you felt so strongly about the subject, Papa.  I’m sorry that I even brought it up.”

The elder housefly remained on edge and didn’t feel like being appeased by a wet-behind-the-ears fledgling.

“Of course I feel strongly about the subject, Young One!  Why shouldn’t I?!  And do you know why too?  Have you ever stopped to think why I feel so strongly about maintaining non-stop vigil on the humans—pestering them constantly, harassing them ruthlessly, making certain no area of their exposed skin goes more than five minutes without one of our ilk alighting on it and hopefully biting that patch of flesh if at all possible…..annoying those gigantic monsters over and over and OVER until they’re thoroughly enraged and ready to literally pull the hair out of their scalps by the roots…..do you know why this job of ours is so unfathomably important, Young One?!?!”

The baby housefly glanced downward and shook his head side-to-side.

“No…..no, I really have no idea why this job you are obviously deathly passionate about is so incredibly important, Papa.  Tell me then:  Why is it so??”

The elder housefly stood up straight and erect on his four spindly legs and cleared his throat to lend greater emphasis to what he was about to say.

“You see, Young One, humans are our natural enemies.  They persecute us, they swat us, they gas us, they pull our wings off, they kill us, they seek to exterminate us, they hate our guts for no good reason at all…..why, their unstated goal is to eradicate EVERY LAST ONE OF US from the face of the Earth!!!  That’s right—EVERY LAST ONE OF US houseflies, I tell you!!!”

The elder housefly stopped to catch his breath because his heart was all but pounding out of his chest, and his naturally bulging eyes were now seemingly jumping out of his skull.

“So then I ask of you, Young One:  What are we supposed to do when faced with that kind of flagitious onslaught???  Just fly away back into the furthest reaches of the wilderness and pretend that humans like us?!  That they’re our lovey-dovey friends and our new bosom buddies?? That they would now desire more than anything to forgot past hatreds and kiss and make up with us??  So we should just turn our tails and fly away and act as though everything is hunky-dory?!  That we’re living in some sort of dreamy fairy-tale world??  Huh???  HUH?!?!   No, no damned way, I tell ya!!!  Any fly worth their exoskeleton wants to stay right here and fight back against those despicable human beings, and the best way we can do that is by pestering them mercilessly every opportunity we get.  Every opportunity we get, I say!!!”

The elder fly stopped ranting at this juncture, took a deep breath, and stared down at his young, cowering protégé.

“Do you understand now why we houseflies harass the humans as much as flyly possible, Young One, despite the immense risks we run as well as the awful dangers we constantly face living in close proximity to those unbelievably cruel bastards???  We do it strictly because the humans are fully deserving of this level of contempt!!!”

The baby housefly was taken aback by his patriarch’s spontaneous display of raw emotion.  He had never seen the Old Insect so worked up and passionate about anything in his lifetime.

“Gee…..I never realized you felt so adamant about the subject and hated the humans that much, Papa.  I just never knew……”

And his voice trailed off then like the contrail dissipating in the wake of a jet airplane passing high overhead as he paused to contemplate his next thought.

“But I worry about you, Papa, I really do!!!  Every time you fly off on one of your harassment missions against the humans I keep thinking that you’ll never come back.  Just like Uncle Ish last week.  He said the same things that you did right now—The exact same things, mind you!!–and look what happened to him!  He thought he was invincible too, and then…..and then he got squashed into a pile of mush and guts on the humans’ big kitchen table.  I just don’t want to see the same thing happen to you, Papa!  I don’t, I tell you!!!  I don’t think I could handle such a thing!!!!!”

Tears formed at the edges of the Baby Fly’s eyes.

The elder fly was touched by this seldom seen display of emotion, but not to the point of vacillating on the ironclad commitment to his species.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing, Son!  Not a thing, I tell you!!  Trust me, I’ m exceptionally careful every time I fly off on a patrol mission.  Understand, I’m not as reckless as dear Uncle Ish was; that guy, as much as I loved my older brother, was too overconfident and full of bravado; he really, truly was and obviously it ended up costing the poor schmuck in the end!  No, I have the humans all figured out by now.  I’ve been studying their habits for years and I can read them like a children’s book.  They can’t hurt me; they’ll never be able to lay a hand on me, Young One.  I promise you that!”

The Baby Fly remained unconvinced.

“But that’s precisely the same thing Uncle Ish used to say too!  He would constantly parrot those same words over and over as well:  ‘The humans can never touch me!  The humans can never touch me!!  The humans can never touch me, Junior!  I’m much smarter than all of them put together!!!’  But look where that got him, Papa!  Look where that got poor Uncle Ish!!!  Crushed to death!!!  I think we’d be a lot better off just leaving the humans alone, Papa!  Just leave them be and not pester them anymore!  It’s simply gotten too dangerous!!   Please, Papa!!!  Will you promise me today that you won’t go flying off on any more guerilla missions against the humans??  Will you promise me that one little thing??  It’s just too dangerous, Papa; it’s way too dangerous!!!  It isn’t worth it in the end, I tell you!!!”

The elder fly looked down softly upon his weeping progeny.

“I’m sorry, Junior.  I really, truly am sorry you feel that way.  But, no, there is nothing you can say or do that’ll stop me from heading out on my search-and-destroy missions against the diabolical humans.  Ultimately, they have it coming.  Oh, yes, do those sons-of-bitches ever have it coming; they are fully deserving of whatever torment I can visit upon them plus some!!  And if I don’t step forward amongst us flies and do my fair part in combating those huge genocidal monsters, then how can I expect any of my brethren to do theirs??  It’s all about honor, Junior:  The honor of defending our species against the cruel, domineering humans.  You see, it’s always been that way and it always will be.  The humans want to control everything around them—And I mean EVERYTHING, okay?!?!–and we houseflies cannot just roll over and timidly allow them to do so.  Such is the way of the world, Young One, and there’s nothing either one of us can do that will ever alter that sad fact.”

The elder fly stopped talking at this juncture and gently stretched both of his wings in preparation for flight.

“I’ve gotta go now, Young One.  Tell Mom that I’m off on another mission against the humans and that I’ll be home in time for supper.  Luv ya, Little Fella!”

And with that the elder fly launched his body into the air and flew off in the general direction of the humans’ kitchen.  He left behind in his wake a sobbing, inconsolable young disciple.

Unbeknownst to the elder housefly, the beleaguered owner of the residence had just hung a sticky new fly-trap above his kitchen sink–an area he knew from experience was a favorite hang-out for any flies that happened to find their way into his house.  He was curious about its efficacy and was naturally somewhat dissatisfied with the old-fashioned method of manually swatting any flies that became too much of a nuisance around his household.

And back in the darkened recess in the family room wherest the elder housefly seemingly had materialized from nowhere, a hulking, hideous-looking wolf spider with absurdly bulging eyes had been carefully watching the heartfelt conversation between the two houseflies from his secret lair not too distant.  When he saw the older of the pair levitate and fly away–leaving the youthful housefly by himself and wholly unguarded–he sensed a rare opportunity and hurried to take advantage by slowly inching his black furry body toward the disconsolate, unsuspecting young insect, silently grinding his dagger-sharp teeth the entire time as he stealthily closed the gap with increasing speed.

Do they add an extra dimension, however tiny, to a conversation or circumstance?  Do they add clarity?  Do they contribute information or gravitas that wouldn’t otherwise have been available without their presence?  Do they feel like a critical missing piece to the situational puzzle?  Do they intrigue?  Or, conversely…..is their absence not even noted?  Does the fact their presence is missing go arrantly unnoticed, let alone set off bells of concern and true alarm?  Is the strength of their personality—and more foundationally, their character—so weak that no one even cares whether they are missing from any situation, regardless of importance?  Do they bore beyond belief?  These are the seminal questions which need to be asked insofar as a person’s criticality as a cog in the ginormous, ever dynamic machine which is everyday humanity.  If you checked all the wrong boxes on the aforementioned questions, then sadly there is really no good reason why you were ever born.  You need to roll up your sleeves and get to work immediately on becoming a real, legitimate, unique individual, not just some DNA-enhanced zombie squandering precious oxygen and soil space on Earth’s finite surface.

The world changed dramatically since the sun last rose in the east, but not for the better.  No, definitely not for the better.  A large chunk of good has been forcibly excised out of the world we live in, and what remains behind for this grieving survivor is only a feeble equivalent of times past.  Yet what is one to do in such a desperate situation?  Is there any reason for hope?  Any redemption?  Any silver lining to this funereal occasion?  Grieving and crying a river of tears isn’t going to bring my dear old friend back, surely, so there is no reason or value in going overboard on those two innately nugatory activities.  But then what?  What is left for me to do, I beseech of you?  He was here and living and breathing and frolicking and lighting up my life like a blast of napalm and now he isn’t, and no emotion housed in the human arsenal can come even remotely close to addressing the unimaginable pain I am currently experiencing.  It is the cross I now must bear into the foreseeable future, and to be completely frank I am not sure I am up to the task.

She doesn’t miss me.  Apparently not at all.  A big fuckin’ nullity.  So let me ask you this pointed question right now:  How much stronger of a character indictment could there be than that?  Seriously.  A tired old axiom holds that absence makes the heart grows fonder, but what if the heart doesn’t discern any feeling at all?  What if the heart doesn’t give two and a half shits that it hasn’t seen you or heard from you since last week?  What if said heart is even ambivalent about the whole matter?  It obviously hasn’t been growing fonder during this time spent away, and one could convincingly argue that the original strong relationship-—if one ever truly existed—is now substantially weaker than before.  One could even tiptoe a step further down the path of logic and suggest that this now feeble relationship is on life support and nearing extinction.  So much for happy, fairy-tale endings…..

We make our own beds and then we lie in them.  Distilled down to life’s bare essence, this is as elementary as it gets.  You act and then God…..life…..destiny…..fate…..kismet…..an unknown, unnamed deity…..the Universe incarnate…..whatever you want to call the all-powerful entity that governs every circumstance associated with the passage of time—or perpetual ungoverned chaos, if such is the case as it may well be—will react to what you have done.  You are powerless then.  At that juncture the ball is in another’s court and completely out of your hands.  Never forget that every person alive exercises some degree of free will over the direction their life will follow, but that “free will” only extends so far and weighs so much.  The rest belongs exclusively to Somebody or Something Else far mightier than thee.

Gramps was loudly holding court down at the small town coffee shop, regaling anyone within earshot with tattered, worn-out stories from the previous century when he was still a boy growing up on the farm.  Everyone inside the Lilliputian café was forced to sit and listen to Gramps’ rambling reminisces regardless of whether they wanted to or not.  Gramps finally reached that familiar point where he started in on his favorite story, referencing the period of time back during primordial days when he attended a miniscule, one-room country schoolhouse.  “Y’know, People, when I attended elementary school back in the early Fifties, we weren’t such panty-waists like kids are nowadays.  Why, seldom a winter morning went by when the temperature outside wasn’t at least twenty five degrees below zero Fahrenheit; then I had to struggle at least two and half miles through at least four-foot-high snowdrifts with the wind howling at least forty miles per hour out of the northwest just to get to school, and the primitive path I followed to school and then back home just so happened to be uphill both ways……”  A little girl who was sitting nearby with her parents exclaimed loudly at this last comment, and a look of profound wonderment crisscrossed her cherubic face.  “Uphill both ways…..?!?!”  The amazed lass looked both dumbfounded and skeptical at the same time, before deciding to confront the aged windbag.  “Uphill both ways…….?!?!   Uphill in both directions…..?!?!  Are you kidding me???  Old man……is that the reason why you walk so stooped over now like the Hunchback of Notre Dame?!?!”

A razor-thin line exists between genuine curiosity and unwanted snoopiness.  Don’t cross that line…..EVER!!! So what is the crucial difference separating these two, you ask?  Curiosity is asking questions to learn and further educate oneself.  Snoopiness is asking questions that do not enhance one’s being, but instead just furnishes one with prurient information about somebody else that has no bearing on one’s own life whatsoever.  Curious people ask honest questions, while snoopy people ask mendacious questions with the goal of gaining some degree of leverage over another person.  Curious people are exemplars.  Snoopy people, on the other hand, are the putrid dross found at the extreme bottom of a recently emptied stink barrel.

…..the goal, as always, is to make incremental progress.  Not a specific target, not an arbitrary benchmark, not some unreasonable expectation—those stated objectives are all unnecessary and too daunting in nature.  No, just make satisfactory progress today and if you do that you can consider the day to be an unqualified success.  Same for tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that.  Setting and then predictably falling short of unrealistic goals is the perfect recipe for disappointment and, more insidiously, eventually quitting a worthy crusade altogether as the result of perceived failure and the dark depression which invariably accompanies same…..