The joy of unexpected consequences

A world in which we knew all of the consequences of our actions before we took them would be a dull one indeed. So whilst I’d admit that it’s vital to know that, say, the dentist is only going to give you a filling and not a full set of falsies or that the road you live in will still be in the same place you left it when you get back after a holiday or day’s work, it’s the little spontaneous details that add the sweet spoonful of interest to life. The unexpected invitation to an event, the al fresco beer and swimming session on the beach, the e-mail from a long-lost school friend, the impromptu conversation with an amusing stranger on a train – these are the kinds of things that taste so delicious simply because we didn’t know they were coming.

But because life generally likes to find a balance in all things, if we relish these small joyful surprises we may only do so in the full and certain knowledge that we must simultaneously accept the presence of their opposite numbers: the unpredicted little bad things that parachute in to prick our personal bubbles of happiness. Waking up with the raging toothache, pulling out a filing whilst eating a treacle toffee, getting a speeding ticket because we weren’t paying attention to the speed limit changing, our train being cancelled, falling asleep in the cinema just as the film gets going, that sort of thing.

If there really is some kind of cosmic see saw at work, then we accept that for all we prefer to be at the up-in-the-air-legs-dangling-look-at-me end, we have to take our turn being the one with the unglamorous bump on the behind as it hits the ground. Up is only possible because of down. Spending our life riding only the middle of the see saw at its pivotal point of equilibrium is no fun at all simply because nothing unexpected – good or bad – ever happens. So, much as we may wish from time to time for life to be all plain sailing and calm untroubled seas, what’s the point if we can never enjoy the adrenaline rush of riding the swell of a huge wave or crashing laughing and soaked into the sand?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as part of considering the nature of happiness. Happiness is a difficult construct to define; ask a hundred people what happiness is and I’d bet you’d get a hundred answers. All of them would be quite correct for the individual concerned, but not necessarily for the other 99. As we have no one core hypothesis of what happiness is then it’s quite natural that we should each see it in our own way. I’d also say that happiness is positively more than the absence of sadness, its opposite number in the great song and dance routine of life. Whether it is possible to experience the pinnacles of great joy without ever experiencing the depths of great distress is unclear; to some extent, I feel that if you accept the possibility of the one then you also accept the potential for the other.

So back then to my own little unexpected consequences that set me off on this meandering thought train. When I was renovating my tiny garden a couple of months back, I deliberately chose plants and flowers that would attract wildlife. Coaxed on by a warm and wet spring, the plants are growing as I look at them and the insects and birds are coming too. Except… I hadn’t really thought through precisely what insects might come, or in what quantity. And so I have become (or the blackthorn tree in the garden has, anyway) home to a huge small creeping army of brightly coloured hairy caterpillars. A little investigation has shown that these are the larvae of the Lackey Moth – so called because the striped colours resemble the livery lace worn by Victorian servants (or lackeys). There will be a spectacular fly past when these babies spread their wings come July or August. But for now, there are huge swathes of twitching caterpillars in and around the canopies of nest-web that they’ve spun in the branches of the tree outside my front window. Which is by the day growing more and more full of the birds that nest there too and feed on these bugs and others that are now coming to the garden.

Cosmic balance? Unexpected creepy crawly consequence? Or just nature doing its thing? I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter in a way, but it has given me (and the birds) lots of food for thought.


Photos:

Top: Lackey Moth caterpillars by Steve Bennett

Middle: Adult Lackey Moth by Nick Greatorex-Davies

Bottom: A gathering of Lackey Moth caterpillars (like those on my tree) by Nicholas Harrison