When you are psychic, it isn’t all wine and roses. The hazards and added responsibilities require the ethical person to keep an eye on him or herself. And sometimes things happen anyway. For example…

I have a Thing about spiders. They have always been creepy to me, ever since I was quite small. Later in life, I learned that people with malevolent intentions sometimes use spiders to spy on and even harm others.

This is not to say that spiders themselves are inherently evil, and I can’t say that I have completely figured it out. The questions aren’t straightforward, either. One could ask, why can spiders be used that way? Or one could ask, why do spiders allow themselves to be used that way? Or one could ask, what is it about spiders that lends them to such use? Each of these questions has a different underlying assumption, and of course each assumption is not necessarily mutually exclusive of any of the others.

Anyway, despite my attitude toward spiders, I am pretty tolerant of them, especially when they are outside doing their job in my garden. Black Widows, on the other hand, are KOS (kill on sight), inside or outside. They are highly poisonous and there are other spiders doing the same job without being such a threat.

One time, I reached for a dish towel hanging on the oven handle in my kitchen. As I pulled it off the handle, a tiny spider that looked a lot like a Black Widow came running up from underneath, just millimeters from my hand. My instant reaction was to drop the towel to the floor and terminate her with extreme prejudice (and my foot).

It was only after that instant reaction that I realized that this particularly little girl had not had a mean speck in her body. Instead, when she came running out, she was sending me a very cheerful message that went something like this: “Oh hi there! Who are you?”

By the time I registered this cheerful and friendly greeting, however, she was nothing but a tiny smear on my kitchen tiles.

I felt bad about it immediately. If I had paused even a split second—if my reactions weren’t so fast—that poor little girl would have been transported outside instead. This is the particular peril of being psychic: that sometimes you do something like that, only to know instantly that you made a mistake. Had I not been psychic, I would never have known that this particular spider, if she was indeed a Black Widow, was not of the usual malevolent stripe of her breed. And who knows? Perhaps she would have been the start of a new race of kinder, gentler Black Widows. Or perhaps she wasn’t even a Black Widow, but one of the other breeds of spiders that look like Black Widows, and it was just her bad luck to show up in my house.

Poor baby.

What I have learned is to pause. I now brush spiders off me and wait a bit before dealing that fatal blow, just in case I have another Pollyanna on my hands.

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