Nature always wins but kindness can too

I'm working from home this week. There's a spider in the corner of the window I sit in front of. She has an egg sack and carefully tends to her web most of the day (at least, whenever I look up from my computer to give my eyes a break from the screen, she is doing something to the web; legs moving frantically).

Yesterday, she caught and killed another spider. This morning there is no sign of it. She's either completely ingested it or taken what she needs and discarded the remains.

She fascinates me. Tucked up in a corner next to a neglected window which should have been washed months ago following the ravages of winter storms, she sits. A diligent mother, she turns her egg sack routinely through the day presumably to ensure none of her offspring get too hot (the window faces south but temperatures in the afternoon are still reasonably warm).

Most of the time she sits right in the corner but I snapped the shot to the left when she made a journey down south to check out one of the anchoring arms of her web.

You can make out her egg sack on the top left of the photo. The curved black blur is a little leaf that blew into her web sometime during the day yesterday. She scurried to investigate it then moped away, perhaps disappointed it was not unexpected afternoon tea.

What amazes me most about her is that she's a survivor. Alone in the world, she fends for herself - food, shelter and procreation. She has no posse, no support crew, nothing. When her eggs hatch, her babies will disperse and she will, most likely die. Her job done, she will perish. Her life purpose to survive and produce more spiders. Yet she (in the colloquial sense) persists. Generation after generation has been and will be the same. Live, breed, die.

And that's really the sum of most animals' life - live, survive to adulthood, have babies, die. If we're lucky, as humans, we get the opportunity to leave the world in a better state than if we had not lived but mostly, we are insignificant.

In that insignificance lies either depression (I'm meaningless) or hope (in anonymity you can make a difference to the lives of others or the state of the planet). From random acts of kindness to advocating for those who cannot speak for themselves (children, animals, plants, the oppressed) we have an opportunity to make a change for the better. Where violence breeds violence, kindness is contagious. Plus, it's free. It costs nothing to be nice. Like they say, spread that shit like confetti!