I am someone who believes that it is forever an option to evolve. I think you can in fact train a seasoned creature, on the condition that the experienced individual is open-minded and eager for knowledge. Provided that the person is willing to admit when it was mistaken, and endeavor to transform into a better dog.
OK yes, I am that seasoned creature. And the trick I am working to acquire, despite the fact that I am a creature of habit? It is an significant challenge, something I have grappled with, repeatedly, for my all my days. The quest I'm on … to develop a calmer response toward the common huntsman. My regrets to all the different eight-legged creatures that exist; I have to be grounded about my possible growth as a human. The focus must remain on the huntsman because it is sizeable, dominant, and the one I run into regularly. Encompassing on three separate occasions in the recent past. In my own living space. You can’t see me, but I'm grimacing and grimacing as I type.
It's unlikely I’ll ever reach “fan” status, but my project has been at least becoming a baseline of normalcy about them.
A deep-seated fear of spiders from my earliest years (unlike other children who are fascinated by them). Growing up, I had a sufficient number of brothers around to make sure I never had to handle any directly, but I still panicked if one was obviously in the same room as me. I have a strong memory of one morning when I was eight, my family unconscious, and facing the ordeal of a spider that had crawled on to the family room partition. I “handled” with it by standing incredibly far away, almost into the next room (in case it pursued me), and spraying half a bottle of bug repellent toward it. The chemical cloud missed the spider, but it managed to annoy and disturb everyone in my house.
As I got older, my romantic partner at the time or sharing a home with was, by default, the most courageous of spiders between us, and therefore responsible for handling the situation, while I produced low keening sounds and ran away. In moments of solitude, my tactic was simply to vacate the area, plunge the room into darkness and try to forget about its presence before I had to re-enter.
Recently, I was a guest at a companion's home where there was a particularly sizable huntsman who made its home in the window frame, primarily lingering. To be less fearful, I envisioned the spider as a her, a gal, one of us, just chilling in the sun and eavesdropping on us yap. Admittedly, it appears rather silly, but it worked (to some degree). Put another way, making a conscious choice to become more fearless did the trick.
Whatever the case, I've endeavored to maintain this practice. I contemplate all the rational arguments not to be scared. It is a fact that huntsman spiders are not dangerous to humans. I know they consume things like insect pests (my mortal enemies). I know they are one of nature’s beautiful, harmless-to-humans creatures.
Unfortunately, however, they do continue to scuttle like that. They travel in the most terrifying and almost unjust way possible. The appearance of their multiple limbs carrying them at that terrible speed triggers my primordial instincts to enter panic mode. They claim to only have eight legs, but I believe that triples when they move.
Yet it is no fault of their own that they have scary legs, and they have an equal entitlement to be where I am – possibly a greater claim. My experience has shown that taking the steps of working to prevent instantly leap out of my body and flee when I see one, trying to remain still and breathing, and deliberately thinking about their beneficial attributes, has proven somewhat effective.
The mere fact that they are furry beings that dart around extremely quickly in a way that haunts my sleep, is no reason for they merit my intense dislike, or my shrieks of terror. I am willing to confess when my reactions have been misguided and motivated by baseless terror. I doubt I’ll ever reach the “scooping one into plasticware and taking it outside” phase, but one can't be sure. There’s a few years for this seasoned learner yet.
