One morning, I was sitting gone out on the balcony with Baby to get some fresh air. It was a beautiful Summer day and me and Baby had some company out there.
There were birds in the sky and miscellaneous bug zipping by. Baby was preoccupied with what was happening on the ground and I noticed two spiders in their webs on the rails. I hate spiders but I figured they were up to nothing so I decided to stay put with a watchful eye just in case we had to bolt if the spider came closer. A few seconds later I looked up and saw a wasp in a menacing hover above the balcony door.
Oh hell no.
I gasped in horror, clenched Baby in a dramatic panic and hit it back into the apartment pronto. Back inside, I checked Baby for whiplash and looked outside the glass door to make sure the wasp was in fact on the outside of the house. Moments later the wasp flew near the balcony rails near one of the spiders web.
I was captivated.
This pesky wasp is about to get stuck in the spider web. Maybe I’ll get to see the spider eat it! Gross!
There was no way I was about to miss that. I’ve only seen a spider trap its prey on television and in children’s books. This was a chance to see some live action n
The wasp flew around the web, got dangerously close a few times and all of a sudden, it flew away. I looked at the web and the spider was gone – I was disappointed with how uneventful the whole encounter was. Before I was about to turn around, I noticed the spider on the balcony floor just underneath the web. Suddenly the wasp swarmed in like a tiny eagle to snatch the spider and soared away. I couldn’t believe what a cool thing I just saw. A concrete jungle nature special in real life.
I turned my head toward Baby.
“Did you see just that?!” I exclaimed. Baby didn’t respond and didn’t seem interested in what just happened either.
It was one of those things you look back on and wished you had it on tape. I told Anon what I saw and he agreed that it was as cool as I thought and a few weeks later my friend showed me a video of a spider outside of her window eating a fly it caught in its web.
“OMG! Ewww!” I said. “I saw a wasp knock a spider out of its web and scoop it up like and eagle and fly away!”
She also thought it was pretty cool and I said “I should have recorded it.” But if I recorded it and watched it a hundred times would it still be as wondrous as seeing it the first time? And maybe it was only so because it happened once. Maybe the once in a lifetime quality is what made it so sweet to begin with. I might have gotten so bored of it, I wouldn’t even think it was cool enough to mention it in that conversation.
Isn’t it better to have experienced it in that moment and live to tell the tale at every opportunity – helplessly increasing the size of the spider and the wasp in my description because that’s what we do when we tell stories. Let’s be honest, it’s really the only way to get the listener to feel what we experienced, that marvelous kid in a candy store feeling.
The spider and the wasp are much like our lives. Each moment only happens once and that’s what makes it so special. We mentally record our lives with mundane activities and convince ourselves that every day is the same. We’re eventually so bored with our lives we don’t notice the colors and sounds anymore. We don’t feel the sensations the weather gives us or smell the dinner cooking on the stove. We become grey, assuming our lives are not even worth sharing with others, meanwhile we miss all the magnificent things that are happening around us, only once upon a time. If we live in these moments hopefully we can experience them in such a way that when we re-tell the tale we exaggerate the size of our world just to get the listener to feel what it is we experienced. What if life was so grand, that was the only way to do it?
What if we were so full when we die, we die happily?