EssayStoryJournalBook reviewReflectionResearchLetterPoemMemoir1,217 words6 min readAutosave enabledThere are memories that refuse to stay where you leave them. Most memories are well behaved. They arrive when invited, usually over dinner with friends or while scrolling through old photographs. They are courteous guests. They come, remind you of something warm or embarrassing, and quietly excuse themselves before bedtime. Others are less civilised. They hide in ordinary moments, waiting patiently for years before returning with the persistence of an unpaid debt. They have no respect for chronology. They are quite content to interrupt your morning coffee, a train journey, or the middle of a chapter in a novel simply to whisper, *"You still haven't understood me."* For me, that memory came disguised as a spider. It happened during a night shift in a care home. If you've ever worked nights, you'll know that the world after midnight is governed by different laws. At two o'clock in the morning, conversation becomes wonderfully irrational. The mind, deprived of sleep, wanders into territories it would never visit in daylight. One minute you're discussing medication charts and pressure care; the next you're debating whether fish ever get thirsty or whether ghosts would have to obey fire safety regulations. Night shifts create unlikely philosophers. Fatigue has a curious way of stripping away the pretence of adulthood until everyone is simply trying to stay awake together. Sarah and I had just finished checking on one of the residents when she suddenly stopped walking. She pointed towards the skirting board with an urgency usually reserved for medical emergencies. "There's a spider." I looked. Before my mind had consciously registered what I was looking at, my body had already decided what needed to happen. My right foot came down with all the confidence of someone performing a task they had completed a thousand times before. There was a faint crunch, a small smear against the floor, and then... nothing. I continued walking. To me, the incident had occupied perhaps two seconds of my life. To Sarah, it had become a moral event. "Oh no," she exclaimed, sounding genuinely distressed. "You didn't have to kill it." I remember laughing, not because I found her concern ridiculous, but because I genuinely couldn't understand what she meant. It felt like she had interrupted someone for throwing away an empty yoghurt pot. "What do you mean?" I asked. "I was going to catch it and put it outside." Outside? I remember staring at her with complete bewilderment. Somewhere in my mind I imagined this tiny spider receiving an official eviction notice before being escorted respectfully onto the garden path to begin a new life. The image was so absurd that I almost smiled. "It's just a spider," I replied. "No," she said quietly, "it's just alive." At the time, I shrugged and carried on with the shift. We talked about other things. Residents needed turning. Tea needed making. Paperwork waited patiently on the desk. By the time daylight crept through the windows, I had forgotten the conversation completely. Or at least I thought I had. --- The strange thing about culture is that it is almost impossible to notice while you are living inside it. It surrounds you so completely that it becomes invisible, like the air in a room or the sound of your own breathing. You assume your instincts are simply common sense when, in reality, they are often inherited habits wearing the disguise of reason. I grew up in rural Kenya, in a part of the country where nature was not something you admired through the window. Nature lived with you. Sometimes it slept in the roof. Sometimes it crawled through the walls. Occasionally it arrived in such overwhelming numbers that your plans for the evening had to be abandoned entirely. Our family home had a grass-thatched roof and mud walls. To me, it was simply home. I never thought of it as primitive or romantic. Those labels belong to people looking backwards. When you are a child, your world does not need adjectives. It simply exists. Every so often, safari ants would descend upon the village like a disciplined army. They were astonishing creatures—millions of tiny bodies moving with such frightening organisation that they seemed less like insects and more like a single living organism stretched across the earth. If their path happened to include your house, then your evening no longer belonged to you. My parents would gather branches from a particular tree whose smoke the ants disliked, and suddenly the entire household became an emergency response team. Smoke filled the rooms while we beat the ground with leafy branches, trying desperately to persuade the advancing black river that our home was an inconvenient route. Nobody stopped to ask whether the ants had somewhere important to be. Nobody wondered whether they too were carrying food back to a colony or whether another ant might spend the evening waiting for one that would never return. We simply wanted them gone. The morality of it never occurred to us because survival has a remarkable talent for simplifying ethical questions. That was true of almost everything. Lizards basking on warm stones became targets for carefully aimed rocks. Grasshoppers were collected after rain, admired for their astonishing colours, and then relieved of the very legs that made them remarkable. Toads inspired a panic entirely disproportionate to their actual danger, largely because no one can predict the trajectory of a creature that appears to bounce rather than run. Rats were enemies by definition. Spiders belonged to the same unwritten category of things whose continued existence was tolerated only until they wandered too close to ours. I do not remember anyone teaching me these things. That is precisely the point. The deepest lessons are rarely spoken aloud. They are demonstrated so consistently that they become indistinguishable from reality itself. For years, I never once asked whether killing a spider was right or wrong. Not because I had concluded it was right. Because the question itself had never entered my imagination. So how do i explain to the society that the main reason i really don't want kids, is because i'm fighting for my own soul. The society is built in such a way that materiality is survival, you need money to go to school, to eat, to clothe, to build a business (even a service business; you have to pay taxes and permits and legal fees!). So then, we're all fighting for these resources to survive. And what's on the line then it your virtue/values. Is it really worth it to get a kid that you might lose your soul trying to sustain it? I mean everyone around me tries to romanticise it, but I know that deep in me lies no stronger conviction that to keep my virtue. A stoic student, I've read of how Marcus Aurelias' life was a tgousand times harder nbecause of family, and the question remains does this pain and suffereing really transforms you or just reveals who you really are. I also come from the most impovershied continents on earth, so pardon me if sometime I romaticise suffering. It's like second nature. If I'm not suffering, I'm not living right. I probably need therapy from God himself at this point. I have a long list of concepts he has to explain to me.