Eight legs on the floor.

I watched a spider crawl across the rest room floor at work today.

Exciting? You bet. When it comes to work stuff, it's a ten.

Mostly though, it made me think. There isn't much left once you have resigned yourself to watching a spider crawl across a room other than thinking. So I thought.

I thought about what the spider was doing. His life (as long as it may be) might be spent crawling from one end of our rest room to the other. He might be dead by the time he gets to the exit. If he isn't, the remainder of his time on earth wouldn't be worth much. Either way, it's a giant waste of his time.

The thing I thought about was how the spider seemed to relegate himself to crawling. That was his lot in life. While other spiders were outdoors making webs or killing flies, this spider was spending his waning days crawling across our rest room floor. I saw no future in it, but the spider didn't know what I knew, so he kept crawling.

We don't know if we're crawling aimlessly across some floor or if our crawl is leading somewhere. It's a crawl. Slow and sometimes pointless. We only know if there is a destination if and when we get there. Otherwise, the crawl is just a journey to a place we hope to get to.

We might make it or we might not, or we might not know if we have achieved our goal. Perhaps the goal is to almost achieve it? Perhaps the goal is to fail? In either case, we keep walking until we can walk no more, and the end is only known when it ends.

What if we're crawling aimlessly? Suppose all of our worry and fear is useless in the grand scheme and our life is nothing more than a long crawl along a floor to no end?

Wouldn't that be a bitch.

Natural History

E.B. White

The spider, dropping down from twig,

Unfolds a plan of her devising,

A thin premeditated rig

To use in rising.

And all that journey down through space,

In cool descent and loyal hearted,

She spins a ladder to the place

From where she started.

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do

In spider's web a truth discerning,

Attach one silken thread to you

For my returning.