A guppy story

I have just returned from the aquarium shop, buying a little tank for the girls for Christmas. In due course, the little tank will be aglitter with jewel-like guppies, flashing their bright tails around. For now, it’s just a glass box with a bag of gravel, a filter, a cylinder of fish food and a plastic fern inside it. How complicated can that be? Verrrrry, let me tell you.

I haven’t kept pet fish since the Great Goldfish Slaughter of 1975, so I consider myself a novice. There is so much stuff to know about fish and their tanks: water temperature over 30 degrees can deprive them of oxygen, never replace more than a quarter of the tank water at a time, make sure you rinse the filter in tank water not tap water (that last bit is seriously confusing to me – ‘tap’ sounds like ‘tank’, right?).

We got there in the end: a dear little rectangular tank with a scatter of pebbles in natural hues; an attractive stone arch reminiscent of Durdle Door in Dorset; and just a tiny sprig of the aforementioned fern. No doubt the girls will soon be campaigning to redecorate with garish blue gravel and a piratical skull.

The tank exercise puts me in mind of the story about the dad who took his kids to the school fete. At the silent auction, the children won three goldfish, so later that day dad went out to a pet shop to buy an aquarium. He was pretty shocked by how expensive they were (you and me both, buddy), but in the corner of the shop he spotted a dusty, dirty, ex-display tank, complete with gravel and filter, for only ten dollars. Sold! He took the tank home and spent a couple of hours scrubbing and cleaning his bargain buy.

At first the three fish looked happy in their new home. But by the next morning one had died. On Monday morning there was a second casualty. The father called one of his mates who kept fish and asked him to come round and find out what the problem was. It didn’t take his friend long to figure it out: the father had scrubbed the tank with detergent, which is a real no-no for fish. In his enthusiasm, he had destroyed the lives he was trying to protect.

Sometimes even when we think we’re doing the right thing by the ones we love, our harsh treatment is more than they can bear. We may be using deadly detergents, like nagging, shouting, criticism or constant disapproval. We’re doing harm without even knowing it.

Most of us have heard of the Buddhist principle of avoiding violence, most often expressed in the phrase ‘do no harm’. In Western culture, we tend to think of ‘doing no harm’ in very limited terms, mostly to do with vegetarianism and stepping over ants rather than on them.

For parents, there are plenty of ways in which we can harm ourselves and our families without even realising it. Maybe today is a good day to think about a gentler way of living.