To All the Insects With Missing Legs: OK, OK, I Hear You

At one point last summer, every insect that came into my field of reference was missing a leg. In a two-week span I saw not even one insect with six intact legs. (Honestly!) The first barely registered; the second was intriguing; but the third, fourth, fifth (and so on) became too bizarre to be a fluke. The kicker came when I sat down at my computer desk near the end of the second week and looked at the ladybug wind-up toy sitting at the base of my monitor. You guessed it — missing a leg. “OK,” I said, “I’m ready to hear what’s going on here.”

So, I started doing some research, both scholarly and meditative. It’s taken months for the missing-leg information to gel, and this passage from Eric Matthews, Merleau-Ponty: A Guide For the Perplexed (2006), helped me find a bit of clarity:

The insect with the missing leg therefore literally “faces a problem”, defined, not just in terms of external features, but of its own internal needs. It needs to progress, and something is an obstacle to satisfying that need, so it must adapt its functioning in order to solve that problem.

An insect with only five legs must learn a new way to walk and develop a new skill-set in order to continue its forward momentum. Something critical has changed in its experience — and indeed in its “container”, in the core of its being — and it absolutely must shift and adapt in order to survive. Far from hobbled, the missing-leg insects that visited me daily were vibrant models of perseverance and flexibility.

Over the past few years, something critical has changed, too, for me — in my experience, in my “container”, in the core of my being. And, yet, in many ways I have continued to walk on the set of legs with which I’d grown comfortable, instead of hearing the call for adaptation and shift. Over the past few weeks, I have experienced significant physical pain in my left leg, and I realize that by walking down my new path on my “old legs”, I am becoming hobbled.

To all the insects with missing legs: “OK, OK, I hear you. It’s time to stand on my new set of legs — and to do so with as much vibrant grace as you have shown to me.”