Pursue that which is most important today

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By Jeff Becraft

Now, I am not a scientist, and I have never done any study on flies. And I have no desire to even do a study on flies. But from my observations, I ponder the ignorance level of these creatures.

I like to eat outside if the weather’s nice. So, generally, most mornings I will eat on our back deck at a table that I made. It looks somewhat like a picnic table. (The making of the table deserves an email all by itself.) I will enjoy the morning while I eat breakfast out there.

This morning I finish my breakfast and I purposely push my plate to the other side of the table so that it will be a fly magnet… so they will go and land on the plate and won’t bother me.

Also, as part of my morning routine, I have a cup of coffee with chocolate syrup and whipping cream. (“Aren’t you a type one diabetic?” Yes… but we’re not going to talk about that right now. That’s just part of my routine. I have scaled down from heavy whipping cream because that costs about twice as much… and so I have scaled back to regular whipping cream. I am trying to get all the way back to half and half in the morning routine. But right now, it’s whipping cream, chocolate syrup, and coffee in a coffee mug.)

So I am done with the coffee concoction and I push that to the other side of the table as well. The coffee mug even has some leftover chocolate syrup down in the bottom.

But where do you think some of the flies are landing? They are landing on my phone. My phone that thinks it’s a smartphone. My phone that won’t even do what you tell it to do. I can ask it to call somebody and it can even have the name spelled correctly right on the screen, and it still comes back and says, “There’s no such person in your contacts.”

Or my favorite one (and the older and grumpier I get, the more I’m going to use this line in my life) – “Sorry, I don’t understand.” Well, I don’t understand either.

And so the flies are landing on the phone. They have the buffet on the other side of the table but they are bypassing that and coming to land on my phone.

Now, I said years ago that I didn’t quite understand the fly population… when there are several of them congregating on our sliding glass door, and I have already taken out Harry, Buzz, and Louie… and there’s our fly, Stan, still on the door like nothing’s going to happen. No thoughts going through his head that “maybe I should get out of here. We just lost three of our boys, and I’m the only one left.”

But he will hang out there, too, until I take him out of the game with a fly swatter. So I really don’t understand flies.

It has been said that a sure sign of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

As I get older and grumpier, I do want my phone’s job and be able to respond with, “Sorry… I don’t understand,” But I do not want to be like the flies. We can totally miss what is true and right and good and be looking for what is most important – love, significance, purpose, joy, peace… and life – in all the wrong places. And then even wonder why we are facing so many consequences and why are so many things not working.

So now would be a great time to take a reverse lesson from the flies and make right choices and pursue that which is most important today.

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By Jeff Becraft