How To Catch A Bat
“When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float’ and that ‘insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.” - Alan Watts
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Let me tell you a little story.
As a kid, one of my favourite things to do was to lay on my back in the evening and watch the sunset bounce off of aeroplanes, making them look like tiny golden toys, creating white lines in the sky. Sometimes it was the plane’s sound that drew my attention, a lot of times I would just see the lines and start looking for shiny little moving air toys.
Where we live also had another spectacle I enjoyed; bats.
I saw bats almost every evening, moving en-masse to enjoy the night. When there was no electricity at night to watch the news, my male cousin and I would often watch the bats and try to catch some when they fly low enough.
But the problem was, we barely ever made success.
Bats are typically blind to the light and their seeing got better as it got darker. Sometimes we would try to confuse the bats flying low with flashlights; it would work momentarily, but not enough for us to catch bats as we wanted.
Then something happened one night.
Is that a rat?
It must have been during the holiday period or a weekend because I remember not having to go to school that day. I had woken early to watch some cartoon (I think the flintstones) when I started hearing squeaking from the kitchen. I thought it was a rat and just prayed for its silence so my parents don’t wake up and ask why I was on TV at 5 am.
But the squeaking moved from an invasion to a cry for help. At that point, I had never had to kill anything. And I definitely did not see rats often to know how to deal with them. So I went to wake my cousin.
To my shock and to his delight, we found out that it was a bat, begging to be set free. It had probably been hanging upside down all night until I turned on the TV and its fluorescence created a discomforting ray of light.
Nobody wanted to bear the responsibility of explaining to my parents why we trapped a bat in the house overnight, so we opened the door and let the flying rat out of the house.
But I had learned a lesson.
How to catch a Bat is to not chase a Bat
One evening when my cousin was in a good mood, I told him I had discovered the best way to catch a bat. I explained to him that we had been doing it all wrong the whole time by running after the bat. We should instead let the bats come to us.
I explained that we should keep all edibles and utensils away from exposure, lock the door that linked the kitchen to the rest of the house, turn off the lights in the kitchen, and leave its exit door open. He thought it was silly but he indulged me.
We stopped flashing lights and trying to grab them mid-air. We just sat and enjoyed the bats enjoying the night. It did not happen immediately, but it did happen once. Then a second time. Then it happened again and again.
We started leaving the kitchen like that habitually, sometimes even forgetting why, and we would have bats just waiting for us. Not usually a lot of bats. Just one or two. Most times they would fly in and out. But we did have a lot of up-close interactions with bats.
At some point, I would even nurse some baby bats till the next day by putting them in a carton along with Guava and water (I can’t recall if they ate very often or not).
Apparently, I had discovered a life philosophy but did not know.
The Backward Law
This Backward Law is allegedly Chinese but was written down and spread by Alan Watts in the west, and it is simply that: the more you try to grab ahold of something, the more it slips away.
In more exactitude, Watts wrote that “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float’ and that ‘insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.”
A more modern, and possibly deeper explanation of this is written by Mark Manson, when he said “Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.”
Like a lot of other things and philosophies I have experienced or learned about, I often forget these lessons and need an occasional reminder like this, to reflect and be grateful.
Today, I am sharing that reflection with you.
The best way to enjoy time with a butterfly is to sit and let it come to you. The safest way to get help out of quicksand is to stop struggling aggressively and to instead calm yourself, and call for help before your time is out.
This thing about quicksand and butterflies and bats, it applies to other aspects of your life.
(caveat: I might have remembered parts of this story differently; memories are not reliant to perfection)
TEA
Thank you all for filling out the ‘Are You Still Reading’ form that I shared some weeks ago (for those who filled, anyway). I was delighted to learn that the consensus favourite episode so far in 2022 has been Why Is Success Easier For Others?
All other reviews and comments that have been shared are being considered for careful implementation. Thank you.
I have not been reading a lot of articles of late, so I do not have favourites to share with you but I am recommending that you get a copy of TJ Benson’s Madhouse if you haven’t; it’s a delight of a book.
Until next week, be kind to yourself and to the world around you.