The meaning of life?

Buglife, the insect conservation outfit, is urging that we stop swatting wasps and start “wafting” them instead. Some insects including some sorts of wasp are, according to Buglife, endangered species.

In terms of endangered, I little thought that a decision to trim the verges in the veg garden yesterday afternoon could endanger anything. I was wrong.

Racing along with my long handled sheers slashing the long overhangs of grass…I was suddenly aware of something hopping away across the freshly hoed earth. I looked harder –  it was a toad moving in a very awkward way. Oh heavens – its front right hand leg had gone, and was a bleeding stump.

I had slashed its leg off. It was me, I have done this awful thing. I wrestled with whether to kill it. It’s a sentient being, it can feel pain – that much I know – can it form a view as to whether it wants to live?

What can it have made of my vast sheers? Whilst considering the brain power of a toad, it disappeared beneath the rhubarb leaves and I didn’t see it again.

Could I have killed it anyway? I hate killing anything larger than one of Buglife’s treasured wasps.

Retiring to the grass for a much needed lie down, I consider the state of the world. All this fuss for a disabled toad.

A large passenger aircraft drifts quietly overhead high in the afternoon sunshine.

Suddenly I fall to thinking about how vulnerable, small, and forlorn the glittering object is. It is impossible to imagine the ranks of passengers, of whom I was one, crossing the Atlantic only last week. It is beyond my ability to marry what I see flying above me, with the vast flying saloon full of humans in which I was seated only seven days ago.

I am left ruminating upon how simple and complex life is – how much of it we take it for granted, and how little each of us really knows about how it all works.