When I was little, my grandfather read me Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather. One of the stories was about Robert Bruce who had lost a number of battles with the English, and was sitting in a cave, feeling defeated and in despair. He noticed a spider trying to make a web. Time and again, it tried to spin its thread, and time and again, it failed. But it didn’t give up. As he watched, attempt after attempt, finally he saw it successfully create its web. He was inspired. “If this little spider never gives up and so succeeds, then so might I”. He went on to his famous victory in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
This old story came to mind as I walked along the lane on my way to work this week when I noticed how the early morning sunlight was illuminating this web.
A few days on (my mind never stops, and seems to continue to make connections even when I’m not aware it’s doing so!), I was thinking about how this strategy of the spider can help us understand how to achieve those less tangible goals in life – you know the ones like happiness, love, and health.
I go to work every day to be involved in health making. For much of my working life as a doctor my focus was on disease management, but in this latter half of my career, it’s been squarely on health making.
So how do we make health?
I explore that pretty much all the time. But this web brought a different verb to mind – “catch”.
How do we catch health?
We talk about catching diseases after all, so why don’t we think about how to catch health?
The spider isn’t like a hawk, or a lion, or some other predator. It doesn’t spy on it’s prey, then jump on it. (OK, some spiders do, and you could argue that the rest do once the fly is caught in the web, but bear with me here)
What spiders do is create the conditions for success.
They don’t say “there’s a fly over there, if I run fast enough I can catch it”. They spin a web.
The web hangs there and the spider waits to see what gets caught in it. This requires first of all a lot of effort and creativity on the part of the spider. Look at the web in my photo. It’s both beautiful and quite stunningly amazing when you stop to consider that the spider there spun all of the raw material, the thread, out of its own body, then created this distinct pattern of the web. The spider can’t just sit about and wait till a fly hops into its mouth. I has to create the conditions. It has to put in the effort and it has to choose where to apply its effort.
This choice of where to put the web is probably both instinctive and learned. (Is it? I don’t know. Maybe a spider expert out there can enlighten me) But there is also an element of luck. It’s affected by weather conditions, other creatures, and the amount of passing fly traffic!
I think health making is a bit like this you know.
We can catch better health by creating the conditions for it.
We need to apply ourselves, we need to draw upon our instincts and our learning, and there’s an element of chance.
But I’ll tell you one thing for sure, and it’s the same old lesson Robert Bruce learned. You have to persevere. It’s a way of life, not an event.
Heroes Not Zombies 
I loved this comparison and looked up, as I finished reading and digesting. My window overlooks green moorland and hills and as I squinted slightly there around the window were two large webs side by side. i wonder if it would be as difficult to paint one as it was for the spider to weave it? Perhaps a good exercise for the painter? Today?
So true….”We can catch better health by creating the conditions for it.”
I think most people have forgotten how, or never learned, how to create the conditions for it. It’s great to be reminded of why we health practitioners (note, not “disease practitioners”!) do what we do.
I think its the web the spider (person/patient) is trapped or unaware they are in that’s the problem in many cases ….We look at individuals .., we look at the bio and psycho for adjustment in the BPS model but its the bigger issues that are so difficult to adjust or change that are often the real issues in health care … I picked up a copy of Private Eye where they look at the madness and unjust treatment of disabled people by ATOS ,the privatised government social policemen . One patient was told she was perfectly fine and could hear well enough (she was profoundly deaf!!) The spider can work away and recreate its environment with patience and commitment , people are often screwed by the system they weave their web in ….
Of course I agree that there is a lot we can do as individuals , there is a lot that can be achieved by human medical/behavioural interventions that are kind and nurturing .
However, I do think in many cases more should be done to flag up and broadcast what are the real drivers for poor health and its more to do with social inequality , opportunity and education than anything ‘medical’ .
But are the conditions which let us catch health all individual? I don’t think so. We aren’t as disconnected as modernism would lead us to believe. We co-create the conditions for health, just as we co-create the conditions for disease. Co-create with each other and with our multiple environments – physical, social, cultural, economic, and so on……