The Fly at the Window

I sit down this morning at my spot at Ugly Mugs.

A fly is at the window.

You can often see flies who have been trapped in a room at the windows. They’ve come in accidentally, with the draft, enticed by the smells, or just sucked up in the rush of air—however they get in these spaces, they do, and then they get stuck.

They can’t find a way out.

You can look down at the ground and see the discarded corpses at the bases of the windows and windowsills. They are the carcasses of flies past that ended up trapped at the window, unable to find freedom. The really sad part about it, the part that jerks your heartstrings and brings you to pity, if you are so able to care about the plight of a lowly housefly, is that they surely could not understand why they were trapped.

They do not know about glass.

Glass is an artificial construct that we have learned how to create and adopt in our human world. But insects, birds, nothing in the animal world really evolved to understand glass.

When the fly sees the great world beyond, following light and green, whatever visual cues it uses to discern the direction that it should move in, it cannot understand why, although it tries so hard to reach the world beyond, it can’t.

Every time, it is met with an invisible and impassable barrier.

The fly is doomed. They are all doomed, once they get in here, and unless they are lucky enough to end up by the door and get pulled out with the draft, they will spend the rest of their short lives ramming themselves repeatedly up against this invisible, impassable barrier, and not comprehending it.

It’s not because they are stupid. Flies are highly evolved creatures, with extraordinary powers, of sight, reflexes, taste, flight. But they have no code for glass.

I have thought about this, the death of these flies, simply as a byproduct of human design. And my mind started to make a list, of all the life that is extinguished in this way.

Worms on the sidewalk. Roadkill. Birds hitting windows. Fishing suffocating in oil spills, a turtle choking on a plastic bag, a failed birth due to toxic endocrine disruptors.

The list goes on.

In all of these scenarios, the death of the animal is simply an unfortunate byproduct of artificial constructs that the animal has no understanding of.

I think about these deaths, and then I think about artificial light. I think about microplastics. I think about pesticides, and chemicals such as BPAs, forever chemicals that are now residing in the body of nearly every single human being on the planet. And I think about how we, you and I, are animals too.

I see how many other animals are so affected by our behaviors.

And I think, are we not?

You and I can comprehend glass, but artificial light, chemicals, and plastic are much more sophisticated and complicated than glass, and yet we’ve unleashed them upon the world on an extraordinary scale before understanding their full effects.

Take a look at the fly at the window, and you may think, poor fly. You poor thing, your mind is not advanced enough to comprehend glass, you cannot find a way out of your trap. You will most likely die at this window, completely at a loss as to why you couldn’t make it to that blue sky and the green trees beyond. But while you and I may feel pity for the fly, now think about how you and I may not be so different from the fly after all.

We are living in a world that we have constructed, a heavily artificed world. And if we think that we are not affected in ways like the fly at the window, we should think again.

There are many artificial constructs we’ve created, and we adopt them because they seem to have some incredible advantageous use. Yet we find repeatedly that there are overlooked side-effects, that are often costly and damaging. The human way seems to be create something, push it to the max, and then see what happens. Well, this strategy is why we now have bodies full of microplastics and forever chemicals, an ocean full of plastic and an overheating world.

The fly cannot comprehend glass. The fly next to me at the window will most likely die because of glass.

What is our glass, keeping us from the light on the other side?