The Stick Insect
This is a short story.
Last Thursday morning I was at my Database Systems course. The subject is simple although it is really boring for me. As my attention wanders, I lay my eyes upon a stick insect that is standing still on one of the classroom's walls.
I see that it is not moving.
Mating behavior in Phasmatodea (stick insects) is impressive because of the extraordinarily long duration of some pairings. A record among insects, the stick insect Necroscia sparaxes, found in India, is sometimes coupled for 79 days at a time. It is not uncommon for this species to assume the mating posture for days or weeks on end. Wikipedia
So the lecture continues, as the teacher talks about database normal forms.
An hour in, I start to get bored once more, but then I notice the stick insect shifting around.
It was trying to walk but it failed to do so. Two of its legs were trapped in a fluff ball.
Sometimes, when under stress, the stick insect automatically freezes and uses its innate camouflage. As the insect struggled, he suddenly became paralysed. And then again, he would try to walk and freeze once more. This cycle kept going on and on as the lecture came to an end.
The poor stick insect would be trapped in an endless cycle of despair and paralysis.
Don't we do that too?
Many times when we are faced with a problem, we prefer to simply struggle and then get angry or depressed, in the end, accomplishing nothing. Perhaps that's embroidered in our nature, just like the stick insect's, but it is by becoming a better version of ourselves that we can look up to the challenges that the future will bring. To me, that's what evolution is about.
We could face problems differently, we could take them on little by little. But we must remember that more often than not, the most straightforward path is to rout in anguish rather than stopping to think about what are our options and which one suits us best.
