I have developed a Zen-like interest in ants that occasionally appear on my bathroom floor. More often than not, it is a solitary ant or two that show up early morning. Their black contrasts very well against the dull ivory of the floor tiles. These days only one shows up. It could be any one or even the same one.
I could not say with any degree of certainty whether it is the same ant because—and I do not want to be labeled a specist* here—they all look exactly the same from the distance and height I view them. It is possible that Nature has ordained that ants have no individual personality but have a collective one only as a colony. Just as I am curious about the impossibly jerky flights of butterflies, I am equally curious about the way ants negotiate their space.
The one this morning was quite like any on any morning. It zigzagged on the tiles and in the grooves between the titles. Its path was occasionally blocked by a strand of hair. It went around the hair generally but at times over it as well. There was no discernible pattern to its movement. There was no way to tell where it was headed and why. At times it just kept turning left like a NASCAR driver and then suddenly took a random tangent. It would occasionally come to a complete halt as if ruminating on the meandering mess that its life is. However, I am sure there is some purpose to its coming and going somewhere, anywhere, quite like the universe. Or maybe not, again quite like the universe.
In the scheme of sentient things, I am sure ants have a purpose, which perhaps extends beyond their own lives. Come to think of it, what purpose does any of us sentient being have eventually? None whatsoever.
There is probably a higher intelligence that watches you and I the way I watch ants crawl my bathroom floor. Do not extrapolate “higher intelligence” into a god-like entity. I am not even remotely suggesting that. I am merely saying that it makes logical sense that there is always something that upends different forces in a perpetual fashion. The universe is nothing but a perpetual upending of forces.
Wow! It did not take me much time to jump from an ant to the universe.
*Specist has been coined by me from species, as racist from race.
