Last night, as my friend and I were getting ready for bed, I saw a spider on my floor. Instantly, the first thing that came to my head was my desire to kill this 8 legged monster. Just as I was about to stomp my overly large slipper upon the intruder, my friend tugged me away. I wondered why he was defending this creature that could potentially crawl into my bed, bite my leg and poison me enough for me to die in my sleep. I mean, we live in a cruel world, why should spiders be exempt from the unfairness?  But I didn't protest.

My extra extra large pajama shirt hung loose around my body as he scooped the spider up into a recently used orange juice cup. The juice dripped on to the hardwood floor as he left to release it in to the wild. He laughed at my reaction to his humanitarian act at 3 in the morning. I thought more and more about my instinctual desire to kill this creature while he was gone, saving a life. And I realized that I acted upon a fear that has always been placed inside of me. I've never questioned my relationship with spiders because I had always known them to be the silent killers of the suburbs. But honestly, how many people have I known to have died from a spider bite? Why did I even become freaked out by spiders? Waiting for him to return, I chuckled silently about my foolish reaction to a creature so harmless.

So what causes these fears? Breaking it down, it was not my actual fear of the spider than I acted upon, but rather my fear of the unknown that identified itself within the spider. Fear makes up a big part of our lives. Those that accept their fears end up conquering the things that inherently control them.

It's funny how my real life story parallels my favorite vimeo video about a son and father singing about a spider in the child's room (http://vimeo.com/2544580). While the song and drawings are mesmerizing, the message holds true to my new perspective on life. Why react to something that never acted upon you? What if the world was made of pudding?