the ants under my foot
I used to make fun of vegetarians. In my late teens and early twenties, I learned masculine identity as the beer-drinking, womanizing, meat eater. The signals were everywhere. So when someone refused to eat meat, it was easy to get a few cheap laughs by mocking them. So mock them I did.
When veganism came along, I was obstinate. I even remember making rational arguments against it with friends and family. “We kill things all the time, I probably just sat on a bug, so what’s the point?” or “plants are living beings too, so you’re a murderer too!”
Then something happened that changed everything: I almost destroyed a civilization.
I’d been walking in the woods on the side of a mountain in British Columbia during a meditation retreat when I caught myself about to crush an ant colony. As I was just about to step on it, I looked down and saw my foot stop milliseconds before it came down on a pulsating mountain of ants. I readjusted my step and unceremoniously kept walking. Didn’t feel like a big deal in the moment.
But during the next 24 hours I couldn’t get this moment out of my mind. As I tried to meditate, the memory kept replaying alongside frantic questioning: It felt automatic, so who stopped my foot? And what if I had stepped on them? Who cares? And even though I didn’t step on them, what if I crushed a different ant colony elsewhere on that walk? I wouldn’t even know; I wasn’t exactly watching my every step.
Over time, that pivotal moment became clearer to me. It wasn’t me who stopped my foot from crushing the ant colony. I didn’t put any effort into it. It all happened so fast. Once the ants were seen, my body and mind naturally avoided killing them at no apparent will of my own. Once I saw the ant colony, I couldn’t intentionally crush it.
On a retreat like this, your mind has more than enough time to process these subtle experiences. Hours sitting on the cushion contemplating my run-in with these ants led to some inescapable implications. First of all, the difference between ant genocide and an innocent accident was my awareness. I was paying attention, so I noticed this particular colony under my foot, and that noticing made all the difference for their fate. The direction of my mind in that moment meant life or death for a thousand ants. If I had been lost in thought, they would have all been killed.
There’s a powerful insight here: If I don’t notice I’m causing harm, I’m not evil, just ignorant. But if I do notice I’m causing harm, and I choose to continue doing it, that’s much more nefarious. It felt like good news: I’m not evil, after all. Maybe that seems obvious to you, but is it? It felt liberating to confirm that this body and mind defaults to compassion.
My well-worn anti-veg arguments started to unravel. Sure, it may be impossible to completely avoid causing harm to others, but I can definitely cause less harm. And it doesn’t even take that much effort, all I need to do is watch my step.
…and right there, that’s how those ants taught me something important about meat.
A lot of my youthful vitriol toward vegetarians was coming from guilt. I grew up eating meat every day, so vegetarians threatened my self-esteem. To admit they were right would force me to acknowledge years of me doing something wrong. It was way easier to mock them than to confront a few decades of guilt.
But that ant colony gave me permission to forgive myself. All the meat I ate as a kid was not because I was evil, I had simply never known the full story: I’d never seen the animals I was stepping on. Meat was put in front of me in sterile styrofoam packets. I knew it came from animals, but I never saw them, let alone killed them with my own hands. On top of that, it tasted good, and everyone was doing it. So I never gave it a second thought.
Accepting this gave me the liberty to turn toward vegetarianism without the guilt. All of a sudden I could think about it without getting reactive or aggressive. It was a relief to forgive myself, but a pain to admit the hard truth: I could no longer ignore the cruelty of meat production. I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but for me, I simply can’t stomach the reality of industrial-strength animal slavery. In other words, I was now staring at the ant colony under my foot. There was no longer a choice.
The veggie meals at the retreat center weren’t so bad, and my body felt good without meat (I know that’s not true for everyone, but it was for me). And so I let it be resolved: from that moment on I would be vegetarian. Some are vegetarian for health reasons, and perhaps the strongest case these days is the environmental one. But for me, it felt just as wrong to keep eating meat as it would have felt to crush those ants on purpose after seeing them under my foot.
Funny story: I was in grad school when this happened, so when I came down from the mountain retreat, I spent the following Monday at the lab. Around noon, I took my usual lunch break, went to my usual food court, and ordered my usual Philly cheesesteak. Oops! As they brought out the sandwich, I knew it would be a waste to throw it out, but I also knew it would be a waste to throw out my intention to go veg, too.
So there I was, in a shopping mall food court with a greasy meat sandwich in my hands, setting a resolution for the second time that week: Let this be the last meat I ever eat. And other than a few botched orders and accidental bites over the years, it was.