Mosquito Squashing Days

When I was in about 4th grade, I was sitting on the back step of our house swatting, smashing, and shooing mosquitoes.  I came up with the greatest idea.  What we needed was simple – a Mosquito Squashing Day.  If everyone in the United States would squash two mosquitoes on this day, our problems would be solved – there would be less diseases, less welts to rub, and we could peacefully sit on our back steps.  For years I thought about how to develop this scheme or get it advertised.

It wasn’t until I was in high school and I had taken the hose out to clean the car after a night trip that it hit me. The car had killed a lot of bugs.  It had killed a lot of mosquitoes.  I’ll bet a lot of other cars had killed a lot of mosquitoes last night and every night.  My Mosquito Squashing Day wasn’t going to make a dent on the mosquito population and it really wasn’t that great of an idea.

My life has included a succession of Mosquito Squashing Days. Days that were challenging to my ideas, my well thought-out concepts.  Days that have included a series of “ah-ha’s” and quiet smiles.  When we don’t celebrate our failures, we fail to grow.  So I’ve had a lot of celebrations, a lot of MSD’s along my path.

3 thoughts on “Mosquito Squashing Days

  1. How many times you hit the nail on the head. Thank you for your insight in how to change those “failures” or perceived “failures” into life learning experiences. Bless you for taking the time to write this blog, giving all who reads it a time to stop and do some reflection.

  2. I went through a difficult process recently, implementing an unpopular personnel policy change. What I realized in the end was how the process — people explaining the problems with my plan and my attempting to explain its rationale — that process improved the policy and sharpened my explanations about it. It was uncomfortable, but definitely beneficial. If only I could hang on to that thought!

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