So… What do you think of “complainspiration”? It’s a new genre I’ve invented (seriously, I just searched it and came up with ZERO results). I find myself wanting to vent (see my June entry) about how hard it’s been to get things done … both in Life and Work … and to find some community around that, I suppose. But I notice, too, each time I do this, that I can’t help bringing things to an at least slightly-optimistic conclusion. Do you, reader, find this consoling? Inspiring? Amusing?
Here’s my most recent entry, describing last week’s productivity rollercoaster:
We get home from a chaotic weekend trip. There are two bats making silent, parabolic loops around the white crown moulding of my living room.
My podcast cocreator and I are supposed to edit episodes, but she catches Covid from her Mother in Law and has to keep her kid home from camp and cancel the poor thing’s birthday party. Her husband can’t get time off to stay home with them.
My plantar ligaments go out of shape suddenly, causing sharp, stabbing pain with each step, while my kid begs to be carried on my hip.
I go to the podiatrist and spend an hour trying to get my new insurance information. It turns out my new insurance hasn’t actually started yet.
Heavy rains all summer have splashed spores of leaf spot -causing fungi. It starts as little spots, like freckles, then leaves turn yellow, and stems turn yellow, and they go mushy, then desiccate, and it spreads up and up the plant like a slow-motion house fire. Lush stems become brittle sticks.
This is the week we’ve been having. Some of it’s to be blamed on Covid. Some is the natural result of aging. Some — maybe a lot — on structural inequality that takes time from women before it takes time from men.
But today, trying to salvage the remaining not-yet-cracked tomatoes from not-yet-destroyed plants, I saw something that changed my whole perspective.
It was a a caterpillar — specifically, a tobacco or tomato hornworm. They metamorphose into sphinx moths, also called hummingbird moths, also called snowberry clearwings (the coolest name for any living thing I’ve ever heard).
And it had a couple dozen parasitoid wasp babies cocooning along its body, surviving off its flesh. Unlike some parasites, for whom its an advantage to keep their host alive, these tiny demons (or, seen from another angle, protectors of tomato plants) will kill their host by consuming it. Shudders of revulsion rippled through me, nausea pushing at my throat. While the hornworm could further destroy my tomato crop, I felt a desperate urge to save it from its torturers. But I felt helpless, too.
So this week, I want to say to us all what I’ve been saying to myself: It could have been worse. You could have been born a hornworm and been selected by a wasp as its breeding ground.
Many of our nuisances can be managed, even brushed off, and certainly most of them are survived. And if we can get back to our work and do good enough things, I’m hoping, we won’t be born as hornworms in the next life either.
