Saturday, May 16, 2009

Reintarnation

I don't use the bathroom much at work. It's not that it's skanky or anything, I just kinda don't stop to go. Get it? So on the rare day when I have one too many Dr. Peppers or the lunch went in sideways, I'm in there, staring at the little radiator thingy on the wall near the floor and I take stock of the frequent inhabitants, i.e. spiders. I don't know what the deal is. We aren't surrounded by woods at the shop. It's in the middle of an industrial park, but the spiders that somehow get in are radioactively enhanced. The kind of spiders you see on a boat as the sun sets, or the kind that thrive in the forests. Big, meaty spiders. And for some reason, they set up shop in the floor heater of the women's bathroom.

Normally, it doesn't bother me because if I do happen to need to use the facilities, there's really never any activity. Just evidence. And once, as I was staring at the carcass of a recently departed insect, I thought to myself, "What's it like to come back in the next life as a bug?" I haven't looked into this too much, but I thought that Buddhists believe that reincarnation is a series of evolutions toward enlightenment. Meaning, you come back as a new being in each life, correcting your past karmic errors until you achieve perfection of being. I might not be correct on that, but that's how I remember it. So, coming back as a bug. You'd live, like, a day. In the grand scheme of the Universe, human lives are but a blink of a cosmic eye. Imagine the nanosecond life of an insect. Eat, poop, make more of you, die. Short, without complications, hobbies, money, likely not even enough mind to experience the shock and horror of such a brief existence.

I don't think I'd mind coming back as a bug...as long as it counted, anyway, due to its sucky nature. Dung beetles should get to knock off credit for two lives. I don't think I need to explain why.

3 comments:

  1. Wouldn't you have to be pretty bad to evolve to a bug after being a human?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Scary that you and I think very much alike sometimes.....cousin.
    Btw, I took this post to mean you may have started as the bug and evolved to the human, no?
    xox

    ReplyDelete
  3. All of this running through your mind while you're bustin' a grumpy at work... :-) E

    ReplyDelete