In a mind that is fascinated by what is new, repetition is quite boring. But life is made of unending repetitions. The repetition presents in Circles which are a sort of back and forth or replication.  I have a confession to make. Don’t be scared of me but a spider has been giving lectures on this important lesson of life for a few weeks now. You heard that right, a spider has been teaching me for about a month now. 

This is how I first met the spider. A long legged blackish spider showed up in my toilet and started to make a habitat on the floor by the corner of the door to the washroom. I first noticed it while sitting on the commode, which you probably call a toilet-bowl but I personally don’t like the idea of lumping toilets and bowls. Anyway, I was here like I had been many times in my life to get rid of soil whose energy I had extracted from foodstuff experienced by my tongue as deliciousness just a few days before. What a sad transformation of food.

As soon as the spider came to view though. My first reaction was to smash it with my primordial arachnophobic reflexes to spare my precious life. I was not ready to die as I felt like I still had a few more books in me to give to Africa. Besides, it would be an embarrassing funeral; the MC telling my mourners, “our beloved Robert met his end from a spider bite.” I am sure my family would be secretly proud of me if I died facing off a lion instead. With these realities and embarrassments flushing before my eyes, I immediately grabbed an object whose identity is still vague in my mind to this day. The hospital located just a few miles away was no consolation as traffic sometimes makes what should be in Nairobi instantly move to Nakuru in the snail speed of our clogged highways which are not that high. Well, except for the ones bypassing downtown drowning us in unwise debt.

But before I could smash the poison courrier, something stronger than my reflexes held back my hand in an instance.  A life saving thought saturated my mind which at this time was intoxicated with epinephrine to fight the spider or take flight out of the toilet. But sitting on that throne with attires on my knees did not provide for much running or fighting. So as the epinephrine quickly wore off my synaptic gaps, calmness was restored and  I could reason again. What if the spider was there for a reason, I reasoned? But this thought seemed unreasonable. What if the spider could be my teacher? This thought pushing out the first. What if I could learn from this six legged bug with a fused head and thorax?  At this instance, I was resolved and I could somewhat focus on the business of the room.

Right in that moment where the spider was staring at the end of its days in abrupt spattered fragments of a mess of flesh, I decided to spare its life as I judged it probably was not poisonous. The spider  seemed closely related to the descendant of the araneomorph family nicknamed long-daddy for their long legs but this one’s legs seemed a bit shorter. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem poisonous.  I was curious what I would learn by repeatedly staring at it every time I went to the washroom, not to wash, but to do my repetitive business of returning soil to soil. 

Previously, I was helplessly staring daily at an overhead fan going in circles, like fans do, to cool the room but the fan was not yielding any lessons and so I gave up on that class. This preoccupation with lessons from repetitiveness was borne out of the electric guitar. Since about a year ago,  I had committed to teaching myself how to play the electric guitar from YouTube videos. I started out with the pentatonic scale which is a group of five melodic keys that can be played over any music. As I became proficient with the instrument, new sounds never heard in life were vibrating out of the strings as my fingers moved along the guitar neck like spider’s legs. New melodic sounds from repetitiveness of practice and that of five keys arranged in unique boxes in successive four frets along the neck of the guitar.

But with the spider, would I hear whispers never heard before from spiders  by a human ear by simply being attentive? Would it be absurd if people knew I was at this time contemplating using my stethoscope that I use to listen to my patient’s heart and lungs to amplify any audible sound from the six legged creature that might carry some wisdom for Africa? By now you know I am consumed with finding solutions (some documented in the books Dollar Altar and Five Fingers) to perennial problems in Africa since our leaders don’t provide solutions but mostly lead in converting our money to theirs through legal and illegal means. So I thought this spider might have come into my orbit to help my quest. But the spider never once seemed aware of my presence  or my clement action shown towards the kind we are not wired to be kind to. But I was eager to learn even though I was yet to speak or understand its dialect. 

That first day of  the spider class  didn’t teach me much. I  just stared at the spider making its web. It didn’t speak or even whisper but I was hopeful.  I was not sure though whether it was a wise idea for it to set up a webby trap one inch above the tiles as the only thing I had seen on the floor were ants that would show up on occasion. Did ants pass as a delicacy for this type of spider? If it was hoping to catch insects  flying one inch above the floor where it was making its web, it seemed like a hopeless miscalculation. Which insect flew this low? What would attract them there in the first place?  As I was wondering about all these,  the spider seemed to respond by its resolve to make the obscure real estate its home that doubled as a hunting weapon.  It  just repeated some motions.  Since I couldn’t make out the web from my throne, at some point it looked like it was floating or drunk because it seemed to move aimlessly back and forth. But I knew it was building the web. 

Once I was done with my business, which is a smelly daily repetition that made me envious of trees, I was careful not to step on the spider and hoped to have a eureka moment the following day. I was envious of trees because even though we get nutrients from the soil like they do, they do not have to deal with sewerage issues like we humans. But I was thankful that I wasn’t immobilized like trees and so I could live with the trade off. 

After several days of staring at the spider, I noticed some black remnants of two small  insects the size of a fruit fly that were right below the center of the one inch high web. But I had missed the action. I did not see the capture nor the dining. I was a bit disappointed but I was content with knowing I had committed to see if I would learn any lessons by repeatedly observing the blackish arachnid. For now, I was impressed that the spider was not just an oblivious contraption of meat and water but a calculating hunter and intelligent architect.  But how did it know that some flying insect the size of a fruit fly would fly so low, I wondered? The presence of the lifeless bodies of  two insects was evidence that the spider knew something I didn’t and I left the classroom with new respect. 

A week later, the spider was frantically moving along the web in what appeared to be a repair mission or perhaps a false alarm of a catch as the web shook from disturbance in the air made by the door when I was getting in. But I was not distracted by its restlessness in the restroom.  As I sat there as I had for seven days now in the restroom even though I was not there to rest in that particular room, I gazed at the spider with an eager mind. Alas! This day was the eureka moment for me. One for the books. Like the crashing thunder of a mighty waterfall, a stream of  thoughts bombarded my mind instantly. Questions that I had never asked before flooded my brain in quick succession. On this day, repetition had yielded and the spider became a philosopher. 

First, how come the spider doesn’t get caught up on its own web? I had seen victims helplessly caught up on the web where they met their end. But the spider walked where others got helplessly trapped. I’m sure science has probably answered the question but I had never asked myself this question before my repetitive quest. This question was exhilarating. But the floodgates of inquisition were wide open. They came to me like arrows seeking a victim to pierce. How does it know where to step on the microscopic web without tipping over? Do compound eyes play a role in aiding the spider’s quick movement I had observed on the web? Is each of the many eyes dedicated to a leg to achieve the delicate walk? How is it that the web which was mostly invisible to  my eyes  doesn’t buckle under the weight of the spider who built it from material sourced from its belly? For me to ask these questions by simply repeating the same thing was profound. It wasn’t the answer  to the questions that was the teacher but the ability to ask the questions? Wasn’t gravity discovered by a question? But for me the questions only came by way of a repeated gaze. Wisdom flowing from repetition.

As I continued thinking, my mind was wrapped in the repetitiveness of life. I thought of how we walk with repetitive motions. That a journey of a thousand miles was completed by the same motions repeated over and over. 

I thought of the  earth rotating us away from the sun in a period of twelve hours towards the night. 12,000 kilometers of rotation later, we wake up to a day, again. By simply repeating this motion, new dawns are born and we access the future as we leave the past behind. Future accessed in repeated motions. 

I thought of my body which was billions of cells repeated from a single cell formed when Moi was having headaches from the Kiambu Mafia. A single cell whose each half had made a descent or descended from two people who themselves were a repetition of a process that had filled the earth with 7 billion people. All from one man. This one man is not simply a religious artifact but a scientific reality of the descent of all man. Not that I need to defend the faith but simply pointing to the rare convergence of faith and science. 

So, if repetition was this important to life, then repetition which is really a Circle when seen keenly must be key to success. 

Stirred by the spider, my mind figured that to make a restaurant you need to master a meal or menu and keep repeating it. Repeat the restaurant and you have a chain of restaurants.  For a bank, one counter and one cashier will do. But keep replicating it and you have a nationwide or an international  bank. To farm one million acres of land, you just need to perfect one acre and repeat the outcome. To make a successful line of bicycles, cars, brakes, soap, toy, shirt or any product, you simply need to master the first one and replicate it to dominate the market. At this point, the spider handed me the key to manufacturing in Africa. Master one product and repeat. Eureka!

The spider which didn’t speak my dialect had become my professor of philosophy and manufacturing. I say ‘was’ as I have not seen it for several days now but a few more lifeless bodies of tiny insects are evidence that it had several catches after overwhelming me with the stuff of science and manufacturing in Africa. On that last day, I had  a few more questions popping in my mind like seeds planted by the spider. How come it went to a corner sometimes in what seemed like hiding when I went into the washroom? How was my image in it’s compounded eyes? Was it giving me some privacy or was it simply embarrassed by the shameless sight as I was staring at it with my naked eyes? How is it that some days it knew to stop one its web right between the tiles which made it carmouflage perfectly and disappeared right in front of my naked eyes and well, other parts? 

I hope the lesson is over and I can clean up the web whose basement seems like an insect cemetery.  I don’t want to find my washroom overrun by the spider repeating its gene, turning my bathroom into an arachnid zoo. On the other hand, more spiders might teach me more lessons. So, I am on the fence about cleaning the philosophy site.

I must confess though, this is not the first time a non-human professor was instructing me. Pigs had taught me compounding  interest and the power of monopolies.  Chicken eggs had taught me patience in patches of life where nothing seemed to happen. The moon had taught me the power of silent power and that of leverage. Trees tend to lecture me a lot, especially because I used to think of them as helpless. They seemed imprisoned, unable to move until I saw birds tricked by trees to move forest. To move them across continents over vast land. Then the Intelligence that reflects an Intelligent Designer was obvious in those that seemed stuck in a single real estate measuring a few square feet for decades on end.  Trees taught me the power of a single seed, the forest hidden in it and fruit designed to disperse the hidden seed which for trees is always hidden in the center. But that day was the spider’s turn to teach. The spider spoke to me with a clear voice.

Have a repetitive day!

Robert Mwangi, MBA is the Author of the books, President’s Advisor, Money Circles, Five Fingers and Dollar Altar. He also composed and sung ZIBA UFA