The Cricket on My Desk

Saturday night thoughts from a rooftop in Mexico

It’s Saturday night. 9:33 p.m.

All day I’ve been looking for something to write. Nothing. Not a single spark. I finished every other piece of work on my list, answered emails, checked off errands, even took myself out to dinner like a respectable adult who has his life together.

After that I wandered up to the rooftop for a while. Rare downtime. Warm night air. Fireworks popping in the distance from a couple of different neighborhoods. The kind of evening where the city feels alive but not demanding anything from you.

Eventually I came back down, sat at my desk, opened the laptop… and out of the corner of my eye I saw something crawling across the wood.

Now mind you, I live in Mexico.

The first thought that shot through my brain was simple and immediate.

Oh hell. A roach.

I jumped back in my chair. Full recoil. That instinctive little jolt your body does before your brain has time to catch up.

Then I leaned in for a closer look.

Not a roach.

A cricket.

He was just slowly strolling across my desk like he needed to use my laptop. No panic. No rush. Just… passing through. I exhaled and relaxed.

I could hear other crickets outside, chirping somewhere in the dark. And this was actually the second cricket I’ve found in my house this week.

And suddenly the whole moment got me thinking.

Why do we react so differently to these creatures?

If that had been a cockroach, I would have been halfway across the room grabbing a shoe or a paper towel or a flamethrower. Roaches trigger something primal in us. They make us recoil.

But a cricket? A cricket gets a pass.

In fact, in many cultures a cricket is considered good luck. People write poems about them. Kids keep them in little cages and listen to them sing.

Same number of legs. Same basic size. Same category of small crawling insect.

But one is disgusting… and the other is charming.

Then there’s the scorpion.

Those show up around here too. I live up in a hilly area, which is basically prime real estate if you’re a scorpion looking for rocks and crevices to call home. When I first moved in, the first time I saw one inside the house, I’ll be honest…I was terrified.

My brain went straight to every story I had ever heard about scorpions. Venom. Danger. Emergency rooms. Desert horror movies.

Over time, though, something shifted.

I learned where they hide. I cleaned up the places they like to hide. And occasionally one still wanders in, because that’s just life when you live a little closer to nature.

These days, when I see one, I mostly just stop and look at it.

They’re actually kind of beautiful. Strange little armored creatures. Ancient looking. Like tiny alien tanks wandering across the floor.

I don’t try to pet them. Let’s not get crazy. But I also don’t rush to kill them. Most of the creepy crawlies around us are simply… living their lives.

Which brings me back to the question the cricket on my desk raised tonight.

Why do we fear some things… and welcome others?

A cockroach makes us jump.

A cricket is lucky.

A scorpion is deadly.

But those labels didn’t come from the creatures themselves.

They came from the stories we were told.

From childhood. From culture. From movies and warnings and whispered advice passed down over the years.

Some creatures were cast as villains.

Some were cast as harmless.

Some were cast as monsters.

And we accepted the script.

Sitting here tonight watching that little cricket wander across my desk, I couldn’t help but wonder…

How many other things in life are like that?

How many people have we been told are dangerous?

How many ideas have we been warned to avoid?

How many parts of ourselves were labeled creepy, wrong, strange, or unacceptable long before we ever had the chance to look at them closely?

Sometimes it takes a quiet Saturday night… a rooftop… a few distant fireworks… and a cricket strolling across your desk to realize that not everything we were taught to fear deserves the reaction we give it.

Sometimes the scary thing turns out to just be… a visitor passing through.

And sometimes the things we recoil from are simply creatures we’ve never really taken the time to understand.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to escort this gentleman cricket back outside before he decides my keyboard is his new apartment.