Mosquito Lessons

What not killing a tiny, annoying insect taught me about hatred and violence.

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Note: To celebrate four years of Certain Age Magazine, on Thursdays we’ll be sharing work from the vaults. Because women’s wisdom is evergreen.

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While staying at a Dharma center in India, I agreed to not kill anything – "not even a mosquito," the guidelines said, as if reading my mind. After all, there were a hell of a lot of the little bastards, buzzing around the dining hall. And the rooms all came with mosquito nets. Ok, sure, I thought. How hard could it be to not kill something?

Turns out, pretty hard.

Because it had become almost automatic to swat one down. I even felt a smug kind of victory when I landed the lethal blow. One less of God’s mistakes, I would think.

To not kill them required me to not act unconsciously, and that meant I had to pay attention to my thoughts whenever mosquitos were around. And they were always around. God’s mistake was just the start of the poison my mind spewed out to demonize these insects. They were evil, they didn’t deserve to live.

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Over the time I spent at the center, I started to realize that – duh – I could swap out the bug and substitute almost anything (or anyone) else, and the process of self-righteous hatred that led to violence would escalate with the same ease. Pick you hotspot in the world, and there you will see people who are unconsciously killing others because they believe they are God’s mistake.

I have not killed a mosquito intentionally since this experience. I use repellant and window screens. And when one is buzzing around my head in the middle of the night, irritating the hell out of me, I try to remember that like me, it too is just a hungry creature. I don’t have to kill it just because it irritates me. There are other ways to respond.

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Jean Shields Fleming is the founder and editor of Certain Age Magazine. She is the author of Air Burial, a novel, and her essays have been published in Moxy Magazine and elsewhere. Read an excerpt of her latest novel, All the Reasons Why.