Few years ago I was fully employed. Like most employment demands, my job required that I attend an important meeting every first Saturday of the month. Like most of the times I was running late for this meeting as well. I was riding my bike through the campus of my workplace to reach my meeting. In a hurry, I rode over an army of ants that were going about their business marching across the road. I realised this just after my wheels had rolled over them. This incident was about to create a string of uncomfortable feelings and questions in me if I had paused for longer. Therefore in an attempt to avoid it, I moved on to reach the venue of my meeting. As I went in and joined the rest of my colleagues, I had this incident play repeatedly inside the screen of my head. I kept distracting myself to not allow myself to reflect and indulge in this internal conversation. As days passed, the intensity with which this haunted me reduced. However, during odd times it would emerge with great intensity and I would use the trick of considering something else more important to avoid processing the feelings that came along with this incident. 

It has taken me many years to find the internal space to engage with this. According to my own standards this was very strange. I never thought this would bother me so much. I was scared of uncovering these feelings. It threatened to shatter my worldview. It hinted to me that an engagement with this would reveal a very uncomfortable truth about the way I am living my Life. To add to all this I was working as a teacher of Environmental Studies. As part of my work I regularly looked at the various reasons for the destruction of nature along with my students. 

I have been processing these feelings over a long time now and I don’t think I have fully uncovered it yet and I do not know if I will ever feel like I have completely understood the way I felt about this incident. Most of us are used to a lifestyle that celebrates being busy. Our education has programmed us to have a list of things that are important and most of these Items on the list are not a product of our own reflection. They are a product of some dominant narrative. The meeting on the first Saturday was more important to me than the lives of a few ants that were marching across the road, oblivious to the meeting and its importance. The world as we are observing has been having many of these metaphorically “important meetings” that have claimed the lives of many metaphorical ants that were completely unaware of the existence of such a meeting. The only way to justify these acts of injustice is to make our decisions, lifechoices, work and values look more important than the unintended consequences of our actions. We have developed this craft of making ourselves and our approach to life look more significant in comparison to the life and existence of many other life forms and lifestyles that do not have the same ability to assert their worldview. 

Every human life does this in varying levels of intensity. While we have been formally and informally learning about the environmental crisis and the destruction of natural ecosystems, we still continue to be an exception to nature and not an extension of nature. I do not think that what happened in that meeting of mine was worth the life of a dozen innocent ants. What about yours? 

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