It can be really tempting when you wake up in the morning and see a bunch of ants crawling all over your beloved spaces to, well, just start smashing them. One by one by one until they're all gone.
But the thing about ants is that if you smash them one by one by one until they're all gone...they will never be all gone.
You can't effectively kill ants that way.
To successfully get rid of ants, you have to poison the anthill. And that means, you have to have a little patience. You have to set out some poison and wait for the ants to carry it back to their anthill, where they share their bounty with all their little ant friends and they all die. That's the only way.
Which means...to get rid of ants, you have to have a little patience.
You have to be willing to let them come. You have to be willing to wait as it seems like even more of them are invading your spaces. You have to resist the urge to squish them or to want to rush them out. You have to wait...until the poison works its magic and the whole colony dies off.
It's not much fun waiting like this. Not when they just keep coming. But it's the only way.
I was thinking about that this week as I woke up to yet more ants in more places and I set out more poison. Because I think an invasion of ants is a lot like most of the other problems that we face in life.
We want to start tackling problems right away. We want to fix things. We want to make the discomfort and the disease and the icky feelings just go away. So when they crop up, we start squashing them. One by one by one. Have a headache? Take a tylenol. Not working? Take two. Have a weed? Pull it. Have a couple? Spray them with vinegar.
But sometimes, the more we try to tackle our problems one by one by one, the more we aren't really doing anything about them. We're treating the symptoms, but not the problem. We're getting rid of the immediate problem, but it's lurking right outside our sacred space, waiting to come back in.
There are problems in our lives that require a little patience. They require some waiting. They require our willingness to let things look a little worse before they get better so that we can get to the actual root of the problem. They require living with the headache for a little while longer
Sometimes, you have to bait the trap and wait for the bigger problem to take it so that you can rid yourself of it once and for all.
If you spend your whole life squashing ants one by one by one, you'll never solve the problem. But if you're patient and intentional about what you're doing, you might just find that the problem takes care of itself.
