We Deserve What We Tolerate

There is only one downside to having a garden apartment in NYC: you have to make peace with the critters that also live in your garden. On more than one occasion this summer, a dinner party or happy hour was interrupted by a cute little mouse traversing the vine covered wall of my apartment building climbing several stories up by the sheer will of their little paws. It was cute because it was outside but still disturbing to a handful of guests that didn’t find my infestation as cute as I did.

Over the past month, the weather has gotten a little cooler and I started to hear something that I wasn’t okay with. Little squeaks and scratches under my kitchen cabinets and below the refrigerator. As I walked past the kitchen in the middle of the night, I heard a thump and when I flipped on the light, a little mouse the size of a silver dollar scurried out from under my trash can and dove underneath the stove.

I knew I had a problem.

I talked to an exterminator and he gave me some sticky pad traps and told me to put a dab of peanut butter in the middle and watch what happened. I watched for days as the bumps and the thumps and the scratches still happened unseen to me and the peanut butter taunted me saying “you have a problem and you don’t know how to deal with it.”

So I slowed down and really thought through what I understood about the situation. I decided that the back of my trash can was the entry point to crumb heaven for these mice and that I would duct tape it closed. But when I started that effort, I realized it would stop my trash can lid from being able to open and close via the foot pedal and that was not what I was trying to do. So I put a trap in the base of the trash can and immediately it stuck to the bottom of the trash bag, also a fail. But then yesterday, I just put the trap outside the small hole and on the ground where there was no one getting in or out without touching that pad. I heard a thump and I ran over to see…. a mouse run out THE FRONT of the trash can underneath the foot pedal.

So I placed another sticky pad there and left to run some errands. When I cam back, I heard more squeaking than ever and when I looked I found that I had not only caught one, but two little pests. I was quite pleased and I removed them from the premises. Not completely convinced I was done with this hassle, I put out two more sticky traps in the same place just to be sure. When I woke up this morning, there were four more mice trapped! They all were itty bitty and small, but knowing that I’d been fighting six mice, not just one, made me feel a lot better.

As I was cleaning up, and putting out two more traps just in case, I was thinking about the other pests in my day to day. Thinking about the squeaks, the bumps, the thumps, and the little tell-tale signs that there is a pest messing with my day, even in the smallest ways. Am I thinking strategically enough about how to deal with them. Am I just acknowledging that they are there but telling others that they aren’t a big deal and just a cute part of how I live life? Am I saying that I am going to do something about them, but putting out clumsy traps that these pests know their way around? Have a I really spent the time to understand where they are hiding and where they are accessing my mind, my heart, and my spirit? If I am going to rid myself of these pest in life, I have to think about them much more intentionally if I want to dispose of them and get them out of my life.

If you really want to get rid of these little pests that cause more than a little annoyance and more than a little havoc in your world, you have to be willing to put everything on the table: your phone, your social networks, your favorite vices, your friends, your family, your web history, your streaming accounts, your favorite news channel… where are those pests that scratch, thump, and bump in the back of your mind sneaking in and where are they staying when they’re not visible to you?

We deserve what we tolerate. But you don’t have to tolerate anything that you know is not serving your best interests or anything that is getting in the way of you living a pest free focused life. You just have to get your hands dirty trying new ways to trap those pests and get rid of them for good.