Little Red Ants

About 2 weeks ago I had to drop my car off at Mazda after the shop had closed, meaning I had to fill out that fun after-hours form and leave my keys in an envelope. Not a big deal. I grabbed an envelope and a pen from my purse and leaned on the stone wall next to the door while attempting to remember minor details such as my odometer reading (why do I NEVER look at it BEFORE filling out the form?) Anyway, as I’m filling out this horrible form (what color IS my car anyway? I always write Indigo because I really don’t know if it’s blue or purple), I realize there is a little red ant crawling next to the paper. EW. Wait. There is another..and another…and oh my gosh, without realizing it, I was leaning on a wall COVERED in little red ants.

How did I NOT see this before I started writing? Well the answer is simple. They’re teeny tiny ants and I wasn’t looking carefully at what I was doing.

How often in life do we do things like this? We have an agenda in our head and just jump right in without looking at our surroundings first. And then we’re surprised and appalled when we realize what we just put ourselves in the middle of. I hate to admit it, but I do it a lot. I assume that things are a certain way. I put my faith in things that aren’t promised to stay the same. I try to live in this non-existent world of everything being stable and un-changing and then I’m shocked when everything is different than I expect it to be.

I get hurt easily by assuming things. I make stupid mistakes because I don’t look at the CURRENT situation first. Like with the ant wall. Just because there were no ants on the wall last time I was at Mazda, sure doesn’t guarantee that there would be no ants that day. So why did I not look? I wish I knew. How do you live a life completely aware of your surroundings? I’m on a mission to find out.