bugs bite.

I recently read "Eat Pray Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert - I'm sure you've heard of it.  It was a nice memoir, and she had lots of interesting things to say about her journey to finding herself.

It's been a couple weeks now, maybe a month, since I finished the book and I'll admit that not much of it has stuck with me.  But wouldn't you know, the one thing that I have thought about many times since I read it is not one of her insights about finding God in everyday life, nor something interesting about the culture of Italy, or the climate in Bali...

It's bug bites.

She wrote about this one night while she was at this meditation/yoga/monastic center in India, she went out to meditate in the garden in the evening.  She said she's mostly the fretting type, and when it comes to bugs when she's out in nature, she's always slapping at herself to keep the bugs away.  Sounds a lot like me.

And you know what?  She decided that night that she was going to make her mind conquer her body and just let those mosquitoes bite her while she had a good meditation in a pretty garden.  And that's what she did.  She got bit probably 50 times, and the moral of the story was that she consciously made her mind be at peace and it was worth it because it turned out the 50 bug bites were gone in an hour anyway and just wouldn't have been worth the fuss.

I thought about this lesson, and at first it seemed like something I should take to hear.  My parents' golden rule growing up was "fussing doesn't help" and I could apply fussing to fidgeting, right?  I should really take her word on it and not fret about bugs anymore.  I just get fidgety and all worked up, slapping myself silly and probably not slapping any bugs in the process.

But reality, like a mosquito, bites (as they say).  One striped little mosquito feasted on each of my legs while I was reading on my balcony the other night.  I let myself fret, and that dang mosquito won - I had to go inside to avoid him.  But were my bug bites gone in an hour?  It's been almost 72 hours now and I am still scratching the heck out of those bites.

Moral of my story?  If I am at peace while the bugs are biting me, I guarantee I will not be at peace for a much longer time later.  The bugs win, every time.