Kay Fletcher Counselling

15/01/2025

'Challenge our conditioning'...

A researcher once shared a fascinating story with me. While discussing a project with a colleague, he noticed a trail of giant insects traversing the wall from one side to the other. Intrigued and a little unsettled, he asked, "Don’t these insects bother you?"

The scientist glanced at the trail, observing it with calm detachment. “No,” he replied, “they’re just passing through.” He explained that the insects were simply traveling from one side of the house to the other before exiting. His matter-of-fact response sparked a thought in the researcher about the concept of cohabitation—a way of life deeply understood by those who live in forests and jungles, where humans and nature coexist.

This story resonated with me and inspired me to reconsider my own relationship with the creatures I share my space with. Before hearing it, I had tried various methods to remove sugar ants from my tea cabinet, where the honey is stored. But after reflecting on cohabitation, I decided to let them be.

Now, each day when I open the cabinet, I greet the ants. Sometimes there are many, sometimes just a few, and occasionally, none at all. Interestingly, they never venture into other food cabinets or even into the honey, even when I leave the lid slightly open. Their behavior has a kind of quiet respectfulness that fascinates me.

Last month, black ants began gathering on our patio, moving from plant to plant, busy with their mysterious work. They never bit anyone, nor did they enter the house. One afternoon, I sat with them, simply observing. To my astonishment, I noticed something remarkable. Scattered among the ants were the bodies of their fallen companions. The ants were carefully scouting the dead, picking them up, and carrying them to a makeshift memorial—a lined row of their departed, placed off to the side where no one would step on them. It was an astonishing display of respect and community.

That moment deepened my respect for these often-overlooked creatures. Ants, like all living beings, carry out their lives with purpose and grace, even in a world that largely disregards them.

We are all only here for a time, sharing this planet with countless other beings. To understand the creatures around us is to better understand what it means to live harmoniously. Cohabitation challenges the conditioning that teaches us to fear or dominate nature, offering instead a path of reunification with the world we inhabit.

I’m not suggesting we invite vipers into our homes, but perhaps the next time an unexpected visitor enters your space—whether it’s an ant, a spider, or a bird—pause for a moment. Remember that your home is situated within a much larger home, one that belongs to all of us. There’s almost always a peaceful, nonviolent way to coexist.



Written by Dawn Agnos

21/07/2024

This looks really interesting. Let's understand and then challenge our inner critic...

21/07/2024

Parity for mental and physical health...

09/05/2024

To everyone dealing with their exams, do your best and be proud of yourself. You are turning up and getting it done...no-one can ask more of you. You are awesome.

Just a lil reminder today 🩵

01/04/2024

Doing something you enjoy...investing in something you value and gives you value. That sounds like a good description to offer our children and young people as they strive to decide on their path ahead...

When he began writing The Lord of the Rings in the 1920s, J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor at the University of Oxford.

At the time, fantasy was not considered a “serious” genre.

So, one of his contemporaries explains, Tolkien was mocked by his Oxford colleagues.
They said he was wasting his time “lavishing such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition.”

One of Tolkien's biographers writes, “He was regularly asked in a mocking manner, 'How is your hobbit?'”

Amidst a crowd of people who make fun of you, who tell you you're wasting your time, who encourage you to do something less trifling and more prestigious—sometimes, all it takes is one person's support.

For Tolkien, that person was the great writer C.S. Lewis.

“The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not influence but sheer encouragement,” Tolkien said. “He was for long my only audience. Only from him did
I ever get the idea that my 'stuff' could be more than a private hobby.”

Takeaway 1:

In his essay, How To Do What You Love, Paul Graham writes, “You shouldn't worry
about prestige...Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.”

Tolkien wasn't warped by his Oxford colleagues and their belief that what he was working on wasn't prestigious.

And after his works of fantasy went on to sell more than 600 million copies, Tolkien would eventually be widely called the “father of high fantasy.”

He is just one example to remind us that what is considered “prestigious” isn't stable in time, and that “if you do anything well enough,” to quote Graham again, “you’ll make it prestigious.”

Takeaway 2:

Tolkien, Lewis, and another writer named Charles Williams were part of an informal literary club known as The Inklings.

Shortly after Williams unexpectedly died, Lewis realized he stopped hearing the way Tolkien used to laugh at the way Williams used to tell a joke. Which made him then realize,

“In each of my friends,” Lewis wrote, “there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”

If not for the encouragement of his friend, Tolkien said he would not have been large enough to call the whole of him into activity.

“But for [Lewis'] interest and unceasing eagerness for more,” Tolkien said, “I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”

- - -

“Just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.” — Paul Graham

Written by Billy Oppenheimer