I Feel Like There is a Life Lesson in Here Somewhere..?

After being away for ten days, I was doing some much needed house cleaning. I had just picked up the vacuum hose ready to start on the floor when I saw it. The most ridiculously large centipede ever seen, just sitting there, daring me to do something about it.

Seriously, this creature had almost certainly at some point crawled through nuclear waste to get this big.

I looked at it, and then to the vacuum in my hand, then back to it…it would be so easy I thought.

But I don’t do that anymore.

Full disclosure, I have spent the vast majority of my life absolutely terrified of spiders and centipedes. There was no logic to it, it just was.

Things started to change one night when I went to my new meditation class which was held at a Buddhist Centre. There a centipede crawled by my foot and continued across the floor. My first instinct was to throw whatever I could find at it, but I realized that given where I was, that might be frowned upon. So, I just watched it as best I could. The amazing thing was that I actually forgot about it at some point. But I think the epiphany began with the realization that I had let it go on its way, and nothing bad had happened.

A few nights later as I was brushing my teeth before bed, I spied a spider in the corner where the ceiling met the wall. I could see it in the mirror as I brushed. Normally, I would have been yelling for my husband to come and kill the spider, but I didn’t. Instead, I turned and looked at it and said out loud, “Okay, here is the deal…I am going to go to bed. If you stay there, nobody has to die”. It took a lot, but I turned out the lights and went to bed.

The next, morning Dave was still exactly where he had been the night before… yes, I named him Dave. Giving him (her, it..?) a name, made them slightly less scary. Eventually Dave climbed down enough that I could catch him in a paper cup and put him safely in the garden. It wasn’t pretty at first, there were a lot of “OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD”s as I walked very rapidly to the door. But now, this is what I do, even centipedes get rescued.

But, back to the giant, mother of all centipedes staring at me from the floor. I looked at the dixie cup in the bathroom and realized it was never going to cover the thing, and even if I did manage to get it mostly over it, it would probably just crawl around with it on its back like a turtle. So, I unscrewed the lid from a jar of body lotion that was about four inches across. I managed to get it over the beast with only one OHMYGOD. Next, I managed to slide a piece of paper under it so that both creature and lid were on the paper. But that was much too flimsy so I then slid the paper onto a small book. This may sound like a relatively quick and simple thing, but there was considerable deep breathing and steeling of nerves involved. Deciding the book made things sturdy enough to carry down the stairs, across the kitchen and out the patio door, I got ready to move.

Then I realized my dog Ella had been avidly watching this whole production. I quickly envisioned several scenarios where she tried to “help” me carry it downstairs, none of which would be good. Ella was briefly placed behind a closed door. I picked up the whole package, walked very carefully downstairs and to the patio door, yelling as I went for someone to open it for me. The door was opened, I quickly walked outside to the edge of the grass, placed all on the lawn, tipping off the jar lid as I did so. I watched the colossus begin crawling away on the grass as I backed away, when within mere seconds, a Robin flew down from a tree, picked it up, and carried it off.

For a moment, I was stunned. Then I went back in the house to find Ella.

Like I said, I feel like there must be a lesson here. The best I came up with is this: You do your best and sometimes whatever happens, happens.