How important is your life?

Imagine that you were little. Little and insignificant. Smaller than a marble.

Imagine that your whole life was just a couple weeks long.

And all you knew how to do was eat.

Oh, there’s a cake. Yum. Crunch crunch. (only I suppose you don’t really crunch cake unless it’s been sitting out for a long time but those were the only eating sounds I could think of.)

Look, there’s a cookie. I think I’ll eat that too.

Oops. I died.

And that was your whole entire life. How much impact could you make on the world?

Ultimately, that is the life of a mosquito. Only of course it’s not cake and cookies they’re eating, it’s a meal of horse blood here, another meal of Emily blood there…

And then it dies, but it’s changed someone’s life forever.

Somehow that just about blows my mind.

That all the horror of my west nile was the fault of such an insignificant thing.

And all the wonderful loveliness of my book was, again, because of such an incredibly small creature. After all, without my west nile I would have had nothing to write a book about.

If you think your life is insignificant, remember the mosquito.

That is all I have to say.