It’s just an ant.

"No! Stop, don't do it. Please!"

"What?"

"Why did you have to do that?"

"Do what?"

"Kill that."

"What? The ant?"

"Yeah. The ant."

"Why did you have to kill it?"

"It's just an ant."

It's not though. Is it.

If you take the time to think about it. Or research their importance. Which I get you're unlikely to do. So, I'll do it for you…

Ants support healthy ecosystems, benefit agriculture, contribute to biodiversity, and offer sustainable solutions for food and medicine. This critical contribution and role in maintaining and sustaining the health of humans and our one-and-only-planet elevates the humble, way-too-easy-to-kill ant to indispensable status for both our natural world and human society.

I had this conversation on a pickleball court at the weekend. As a daily adopter of the Five Precepts of Buddhism, this happens a lot. I'm not here to judge your choices, self-righteously make you feel bad about your actions, or emotively coerce you into changing your belief systems and adopting mine.

But here's what this experience made me think about: how often do we casually dismiss things as "just" something?

How often have you asked someone what they do for a job and they reply, "I'm just a waiter. I'm just a cleaner. I'm just a volunteer." How many times do we diminish, discredit or overlook what we don't respect or understand the deeper value of?

It's just an ant. It's just a joke. It's just a small business. It's just one vote. It's just a missed call. It's just someone being silly or sensitive.

We live in a world where "just" has become our default state. A justifiable position to not have to look or think deeper, to not have to consider consequences, or to see past the surface level of our actions and the impacts and imprints they create.

But every "just" is connected to something else.

That ant supports the ecosystem that grows our food. That flippant comment might be someone's only interaction today. That small business employs someone's single-income earning parent. That missed call could have changed someone's world, or even the wider one.

What if we choose today to change the script and with it the bigger-picture story? What if we choose to trade "just" for "even"? Even an ant matters. Even that cleaner matters. Even poorly timed or insensitive jokes matter. Even my single vote matters to the outcome of this election.

There is no such thing as "just" anything. Every word, every decision, every action, every experience is an opportunity to embody Gandhi's dream of being the change we wish to see in our world, because that too more than just matters.

H2BH 006/365