ANTS RUINED MY INNER PEACE.

I have been trying to meditate. I read a book about successful people and they all found it useful to sit there doing nothing. So I thought I'd give it a chance. The book offered a list of different practices -- from walking "as slowly as a dung beetle" to invoking the spirit of Mary Magdalene. I chose the type where you think the word "compassion" over and over, while concentrating on a large black screen. I have certain proclivities, however, that make it difficult to carve out the time. For instance: I do not, as a rule, kill ants. And since the rains have started, this bug-loving habit can add an extra 30 minutes to my morning shower -- precisely the allotted time for my beginner's meditation. In single-file formation, the ants march into my bathtub through a crack above the faucet, then fan out, scouring the porcelain landscape like fanatical little crusaders in search of the Promised Land. I escort each feelered creature to safety. The intelligent ones clamber right up on my finger, eager for a ride to the sink. Others are too stupid or too distracted. They dart this way and that -- acting impossibly busy -- hell-bent on being there for insect Armageddon. They wouldn't know a savior if it slapped them in the mandible. I tempt them with toilet paper lifeboats, swinging pairs of underwear and locks of hair. I drive them with a relentless tractor-like finger into the refuge of a shower curtain crease. All the while, I speak words of tender exhortation and sometimes wrath. Given my ripening childbearing age, people overhearing me might say that I have put off motherhood too long. But ants are living things, too. They need no symbolism to deserve my affections. It's not like I'm a saint or anything. My mother recently was having some medical complications and the doctors feared she might have cancer. I love my mother but for some reason I kept forgetting to call her to find out about various test results. It felt so illusive -- men in lab coats hunched over an invisible smear of my mother's blood, reading numbers on a machine. How does one respond to information like that? But with the ants, it was a simple ethical directive. Either I save them or I kill them, washing them down the drain with their little legs struggling and their group mind broadcasting silent chemical screams. Now I don't kid myself that I've never killed an ant. When I stomp along the dark hall where they wind their secret paths to the garbage or the Kitty Vittles, I'm sure I squash a fair number. But not on purpose. We all do countless evils without conscious intent. I have made my peace with that; there is only so much one person can be responsible for, don't you agree? The best we can do is cultivate a sense of priorities. Of course, sometimes playing God can lead to trouble. I remember one time a sassy little ant had eluded all the life-saving traps I could devise and I was at my wit's end. I ripped off the flap of a Sudafed box and cornered the feisty speck against a lake of faucet drippings. I was sweating and cursing, curled naked over the tub. I tried to force her onto the bit of cardboard. "Come on little anty. Let's go for a ride." The puny brute ran under the jagged edge. "Scoopety scoop." In my hasty altruism, I crushed her hind leg but managed to transport her to the counter, where she flailed like a dying opera singer. Shivering and world weary, I took my shower, and when I got out, she was gone. Maybe she hobbled off to die somewhere or got a piggyback ride from a passing cousin, or made a miraculous recovery. They do that, you know. Anybody who's spent any quality time with ants can vouchsafe that they are capable of physiological miracles the likes of which humans never experience. In any case, the evidence was gone and it was time for me to sit quietly, do nothing and think about compassion. When the phone rang, I knew it was my mother, but I didn't answer. My mind was blank and dark as a bank of storm clouds. Compassion, compassion pulsed through my arteries, cleaning out all those years of psychic toxins the book had talked about. Besides, if I had told her once, I had told her a million times: Never call me while I'm meditating. Feb. 17, 1997