Being the wonderful compassionate person I am, I take pity on little sun lizards who manage to find themselves trapped in the office after venturing through the open door to explore, only to find they can’t manage to discover where the door is again so they can head home.
Have you ever tried to catch one of those slippery little suckers? Don’t they know we’re trying to help them? Obviously not, for no matter how close you get, they’ll always manage to dart off just when you’re poised for that crucial grab. There’s definitely an art to catching them, and I’ve even succeeded a couple of times recently, though the last one didn’t seem impressed and kept biting me. He made it out the door, a little unceremoniously and not with the same gentle handling and kind words as his mates usually receive.
Today I saw another side to our cute friendly lizards. The Dark Side. Apart from the fact I didn’t have a camera, it would’ve been a perfect David Attenborough moment, and I didn’t even have to camp out under a rock for three weeks to capture the moment. There, right under my feet, was yet another sleek little fella out for an adventure, so with the best intentions I felt it my duty to ‘catch and release’ so he wouldn’t spend the rest of his days wandering the office before dying of starvation.
What I hadn’t taken into consideration though, was the moth flapping about just above floor level about a metre in front of him. I always knew those little lizards were fast, but he made that distance in a flash and clamped on to the moth like he was never going to see another meal. With the moth flapping for all it was worth and the lizard wriggling and wrestling with his prize, he managed to manoeuvre himself behind the desk into the corner where no doubt he wanted to hide from public view and do unspeakable things to his poor unsuspecting catch.
Maybe I won’t be so compassionate in the future. I’ll trust that in the scheme of things they’re intelligent enough to survive without too much help from me, and after all, how else do they live other than by murdering some innocent soul just going about their own business.
Some say it’s a dog eat dog world, and the only way to win in the rat race is simply to be a bigger rat than the rest, or the only way to climb that corporate ladder is to clamber over those above you and stamp on their fingers as you go past.
Survival of the fittest is one thing, and a bit of healthy competition can often challenge us to be more determined to reach our potential and achieve our goals, but when it comes down to us mere mortals who have to live and work alongside each other day in day out, I prefer to believe in a lot more inclusive approach.
Whether you’re a brain surgeon or garbage collector, a corporate bigwig or checkout chick, a teacher or student, a musician, mechanic, accountant, chef, short order cook, stay at home Mum, engineer and the list could go on for pages, whatever it is, we all need each other. No matter what we do or would like to do, in the end they’re all just jobs, and all are necessary to make up the complex fabric of society and keep it humming along.
Our jobs, or lack of a job for the unemployed, are only part of who we are. What we do shouldn’t determine who we are, either for ourselves or in the eyes of others. Rather, who we are should be integrated into what we do.
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