Yesterday, March 10th, Boris should have turned 31. But, as we all know, our people are forever frozen in time. In his case, he’s forever 27. I miss him so much every day, but on his birthday I always feel his absence a little more. For his birthday, wanted to share a memory and what I recently came to learn from that story.
One time I was driving and Boris was in the passenger seat. We were on Cobb Parkway just on the edge of Atlanta, which is a pretty busy area. As I stopped at a red light, I noticed a spider coming down from the ceiling of my car and it was dangerously close to my right arm. I began to panic. The light turned green at some point and I started driving ahead while panicking. I think I screamed. All rational thinking left my body. I put my hand on my door handle as if to open it (reminder: I was DRIVING). Boris firmly touched my arm and exclaimed: STOP! He said something else about how it was “just a spider” and snapped me back to reality. Then he rescued it—he probably put it outside the window. We laughed about it much later, but at that moment he was stunned that I really considered abandoning him on a busy road with the car in drive. Somehow my brain told me that the safest thing to do in that situation was to get out of the car because clearly, this spider was more dangerous than that. And the thing is—I would never ever think of doing that. I mean, that is insane! It was just a spider. But I panicked. I couldn’t think clearly. I was caught up in the fear. Tunnel vision. And Boris brought me back to Earth. It was just a spider.
And the thing is, Boris wasn’t always grounded. He was anxious, impulsive, and frankly made bad decisions all the time. But, in a different way than me. He often reminded me that things were gonna be ok if I just took a deep breath and, for lack of a better word, relaxed. It was just a spider. It wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t going to kill me (I mean probably not, right?). I was gonna be ok. The wisdom I recently gained from this memory is that I do tend to get flooded when something isn’t right or something unexpected happens, but once I take a deep breath and consider the issue in the bigger picture and realize “it is just a spider”, I am ok.
Since Boris died I have planned a day of service or some sort of fundraiser in his memory for his birthday. This year I never got a response from the animal rescue that I’d worked with in the past and then it became too late to use a different rescue because they were not available for us to volunteer on the weekend I’d planned. This really stressed me out! I felt like people were counting on me and I wanted things to be easy and fun and, well, perfect. After texting a few friends, I quickly was snapped back to Earth yet again–one friend told me Boris would not want me to be stressed about this. When I read her text, tears filled my eyes. She was right. It is just a spider! I just needed to take a deep breath and know that things were going to be ok even if it wasn’t perfect. Some things aren’t worth the panic and the stress. Some things can wait an extra day or maybe the terrible thing isn’t really that terrible. It’s just a spider.