A really good friend recently sent me the podcast “No Such Thing as a Fish,” accompanied by this message, “My new favorite thing is knowing some spiders can see stars!”

It’s true. Some spiders can see stars. They can also see the moon and a few other amazing things. We have no way of knowing what they are making of it all, but it just plain makes my heart happy to think of these amazing little spiders hanging out in a field, looking up at the night sky and taking it all in.

“Knowledge nuggets,” small tidbits of factual information that are short and sweet but somehow manage to shift your entire perception of absolutely everything, are my favorite things. They teach, they inform, and they force me to check myself for the “serious business” attitude trap that from time to time is my nemesis. Like last week.

I was back home to say goodbye to a good friend who died, far too young, of a heart attack. The farewell was exactly what Andy would have wanted, not anything like a funeral. More like a great rollicking barn party where a slew of friends got together to eat, dance and tell great stories.

As the memories and laughs were flowing, I decided to join in and I bungled it. Like, in a personally embarrassing way. I got the words slightly askew and placed the emphasis on the wrong parts, and it sort of wound up sounding like I was making a sincere statement about myself and how important my former work had been. Which, ugh. It was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to say.

The point I had been trying to make, irony alert, was that the great gift Andy gave to me (repeatedly) was lovingly poking fun at how seriously I took myself sometimes and shaking me out of it. He taught me that life is for living and you honestly get more done if you can sing and laugh your way through it than if you get weighed down by the seriousness of it all. Even when it is serious.

And like I said, I blew it. Which then, in the way of us humans, caused me to replay the bungle over and over and over in my brain. Walking the dog, cringe. Toasting my bagel, cringe. Lying awake at 3 a.m., cringe. And with every cringe, a renewed sense of the irony, because this is exactly the sort of thing he’d find hysterical.

My bungle, in the grand scheme of things, was not earth-shattering. I was the one giving it weight. And now I am writing about it, to compound all that. Ah, well.

All of us have things that matter to us deeply, and in truth, I care deeply about my work which, sometimes, is genuinely serious stuff. But Andy was right.

Serious or not, solutions present themselves when we meet the moment with joy, humor and curiosity. Even if it feels big and heavy.

So I am going to consider my bungle – or rather, my attitude toward it – one last life lesson from Andy, who in our very last conversation, reminded me that “awkwardness is highly underrated.”

I don’t have a firm set of beliefs on an afterlife. The thing that rings the truest for me is a hodge-podge mix of science and Buddhism, a sort of “return to the cosmos” theory. And in a world of stargazing spiders, I like to imagine them all looking up, admiring the new glimmer in the night sky that is him, and feeling their hearts lift at the sight. Thanks, Andy.

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