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An Ugly Bug
The other day I found a very big and strangely elegant centipede on my wall -- about six inches of 100 perfectly coordinated legs. (Every think of the coordination required to get anywhere with 100 legs?) My immediate response was to kill it by putting my shoe on the wall and smashing it. But I only smashed part of it, and despite being mortally wounded, for some time it struggled to stay alive. I looked up this "model" on the Internet and found out that it posed no threat to me or my pets. I could have captured it in a towel and deposited it outside -- no harm done. But my immediate response was to kill it. I don't know how long it took it to grow to that size; probably quite a while. It had caused me no harm but in a knee-jerk reaction I felt I needed to kill it. It had struggled valiantly to save that one life it had -- just as I or any animal, bird, or fish would. Maybe you think all this this is silly, but that ugly bug taught me something about life. They say that Buddhists are opposed to killing any living thing. In a strange way I can better understand that now. -The Irreverent Reverend
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Some of the most unexpected things can bother you. 