The Bug on the Windscreen

 ©Lyn Murphy 2011

There was a bug on the windscreen of the car.

We had stopped, during our Sunday drive in the countryside, to have a look at a quaint little knick-knack shop. As we pulled back into the traffic on the Highway, we spotted the bug on the driver’s side of the windscreen.

Don’t ask me what kind of bug he was. He was orange and black, with an angular body and long, stick-thin legs. Right then, those stick-thin legs quivered with the effort of hanging on to the windscreen as the momentum of the car increased the flow of air around him.

We expected he would soon lose his grip and fly off – back to his home patch. But, instead, he hung on for grim death and he stayed hanging on for at least another ten kilometres or so, until he suddenly disappeared during the brief moment when our attention was diverted elsewhere.

 Now ten kilometres for us, when travelled in a car, is hardly any distance at all. But, to a little orange and black bug with stick-thin legs – it could well be like being transported to another planet. I guess it didn’t occur to him that every minute spent clinging to that slippery glass windscreen was taking him further and further away from everything familiar to him. From his family (do bugs live in family groups?) and from his major food source (whatever that might be).

All he had to do was let go. Yet he stayed there, clinging on with every ounce of his strength, until he simply couldn’t hold on any longer.

I doubt that bugs have the ability to reason. Whatever his reason for continuing to enduring the G-forces of travelling on the windscreen of our car – I’m sure it was all to do with an instinctual fear of the unknown.

It’s the same kind of fear that keeps us clinging on to things that are really of no benefit to us either. And we do, don’t we? We cling on to hurts and grievances from the past, to wrong attitudes and unfounded, unrealistic fears and anxieties. We hang on with the same grim determination of the bug on the windscreen – even though every second that we continue on this journey is often taking us further and further down the road to our own destruction.

We hang on because we don’t know how to let go, or what will happen when we do. We most certainly have the ability to reason that this kind of behaviour is not good for us, and yet our fear often outweighs our common-sense.

Now I could have told that bug ‘If you let go now, before the car picks up speed, you will be able to flap your wings and escape the drag of the car.’ See I was able to see things from a much different perspective than the little bug. And sometimes we need to seek out people who can help us too – people who can see the bigger picture and advise us accordingly.

© Lyn Murphy 2011