Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes

A fly came to rest on a man’s hand.
The man noticed the fly and swiped at it angrily.
‘Get away,’ he scowled.
The fly left the man’s hand and, after a suitable time, came to rest once more on the man’s hand.
The man looked at the fly and cursed it, but the fly didn’t respond well to bad language, so it stayed put.
With ill-will, the man quietly picked up the ruler beside him with his other hand and took aim, hovering the ruler above the fly, calculating its trajectory for the fly’s demise.
The ruler smacked down on his hand but not the fly, which had felt the air-pressure of the ruler way before it could do any damage.
The man let out a whimper and his face reddened, but the moment he collected himself and put himself back to work, the fly came back to rest on his hand again.
‘You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you, you little terror,’ he said, perfectly caught in the game that he assumed the fly was playing.
As the man was working on an important thesis at his desk, which needed to be finished that afternoon, he returned to his work, flinching his hand every ten seconds to get the fly off, but it wasn’t long before he realised that he was getting nowhere.
Fully resigned to the task of waging unyielding war on the fly before returning to his primary task, the thesis, an idea came to him.
What if I put clear honey on my hand where the fly comes to rest?
He went to the kitchen and put the honey on his hand.
He returned to sit at his desk and waited, but when the fly returned, it chose to land on his thumb, which had no honey on it.
The man cursed the fly and waved it away.
The fly flew off lazily from the hand and watched from a vantage point as the man decided what action to take next.
He could hardly work on his thesis with honey on his hand, so he returned to the kitchen to clean it off.
Once back at his desk, the fly came to rest on his hand in the usual place.
‘Blasted thing,’ the man said through gritted teeth.
With his anger to the fore, he found that he itched on different parts of his body and began to comfort his disease by scratching his head, then his thigh and finally his face.
Such was the discomfort of this respected man of letters that when he looked at his paperwork, they seemed to represent nothing.
Consumed by the fly, the man worried that he would not be able to finish his work on time and decided that drastic action had to be taken.
In the kitchen, he grabbed a can of air freshener and returned to his desk.
He aimed the can at his hand and waited for the fly to appear.
Minutes passed, but then the fly came to rest on the finger that was restlessly waiting to press the can’s nozzle.
‘Damn you!’ said the man, so close to the fly that he could eat it, if only it wouldn’t fly away.
Slowly bringing the finger closer to his mouth, he bit down hard on the nozzle but the fly had flown away.
The taste of the air freshener, which had spewed its poison into his mouth, was awful. He spat it out over his papers and ran to the kitchen for water.
After gurgling two glasses of orange juice, the sickening flavour of chemicals subsided and the man returned to his desk.
The liquid debris from his mouth has stained his papers, two of which would certainly need to be rewritten.
In a state of desperation, the man began to think clearer. He had a certain amount of respect for the fly by this time, and started to see the stupidity of his fight against it.
After all, the ruler, the honey and the air-freshener had proved useless against the fly, and he had only hurt himself by retaliating.
Understanding that his work would never be finished if he allowed the fly to annoy him, the man decided to take evasive action, or inaction.
The fly came to rest on the man’s hand once more, but the man continued to work. He gave no thought to the fly at all.
‘It’s hardly a horsefly so it can’t hurt to ignore it,’ he thought to himself with a little smile.
As the man relaxed with this thought, the thought which had been lost prior to smacking himself with the ruler came straight back to him.
‘Excellent,’ he said, picking up his pen and scribbling with his writing hand.
The fly remained on his other hand but, as the man continued to ignore him, the fly started to walk around the hand in order to get the man’s attention. It could even be said that the fly was beginning to get angry with the man’s inaction, but after a short while its anger was replaced by respect for the man.
The man carried on writing with his other hand and eventually the fly gave up.
‘What’s the point of annoying this man if he refuses to fight me?’ thought the fly before taking flight.
When the man finally noticed that the fly had gone, he put his pen down.
His face had lightened and the creases of frustration that had grown into his forehead over the years had somehow softened.
Just then, he heard the front door slam.
His wife could be heard bustling herself into the kitchen with the trail of shopping bags in her hands.
After she had noisily placed the contents of the bags onto the table, the man could hear the fridge-door open and slam shut every few seconds and then the cupboard doors slammed harder. She seemed in a bad mood.
But it was as if a light had come on in his head.
Thoughts of bundling himself into the emotional boxing ring for the pounding rounds of verbal abuse that they insisted on piling upon each other were nothing but an absurdity.
He felt no antipathy for his wife for disturbing him.
‘Perhaps it could work with the wife, too,’ he thought.
Instead of sitting tight at his desk, pretending not to let her bother him, or shouting after her to pipe down, he calmly walked over to the kitchen and stood at the door.
‘Would you like some tea, darling?’ he said.
His wife stood still for a minute and her head jolted to one side involuntarily, but when she turned around and saw his face full of love, she melted on the spot.
‘Thank you, that would be lovely,’ she replied, with a happily quizzical smile.