Mayfly

On my bike ride yesterday morning a mayfly paused and perched on the seatpost quick-release of my bicycle. I was stopped, as I often am, with my camera in hand, and the mayfly was momentarily more interesting than the ducks I had been intending to photograph.

Mayflies spend most of their brief lives as nymphs, a period of time measured in weeks or, at best, a few months. Their adult lives are even shorter. As adults they have no mouths and cannot eat. They can only fly, mate, lay eggs, and die. That’s what they do with the approximately 24 hours of adulthood they get.

Trout like mayflies and we humans like mayflies because we humans like trout and trout like mayflies. Some humans use their human ingenuity to make little mayfly replicas from feathers and thread to fool the trout. Trout and humans have mouths and more time to think about things other than mating. Trout can’t fly, but they get to swim and eat and mate and serve as recreational obsessions for certain humans. They also get to be metaphors for people like Richard Brautigan.

Humans have longer lifespans than mayflies or trout and we make all kinds of things, things like fake flies to fool trout and airplanes because we envy birds. We make clever things like cameras to help us remember things we see, fleeting things like mayflies.

We make language and metaphors and we tell each other stories and we show each other pictures. We have gotten very good at it, perhaps too good, because now it’s become so easy to be distracted by what we’ve built and we fail to see beyond our stories and inventions.

The mayfly can easily just be a metaphor, here to remind me that life is short. But it’s paused here, as am I, just doing what seems to be worth doing in this moment. I suppose that is all that any of us are doing every day and I reckon that’s enough.