Mother Nature's Son...Um, I Mean Daughter

I'm sitting in my office, watching a spider crawl up the wall, listening to an all-Beatles internet radio station because I left my Ipod at home for my nephew to listen to, and thinking about instant karma. The zen concept, not the John Lennon song.

If I kill this spider, will I be run over by a semi on the way home? According to my understanding of karma, it's a little more complicated than that, a gradiose version of paying it forward only to be rewarded in some other lifetime. However, in the week before closing on my house, is it really a risk I am comfortable taking?

And...can I balance out killing a spider by the other nice things I've done today: resetting the timer on the coffeemaker so that my mother-in-law would have fresh coffee when she got up, leaving my laptop and Ipod for my technology-deprived 18-year-old nephew who is working his tail off for us in getting us moved, and letting a Hispanic guy in a Mazda merge into the space in front of me on Kenilworth Ave. this morning?

While I wrote this, the spider wandered off, and it's all fifteen minutes of wondering wasted, except that it's got me thinking about karma this week, when the goodwill of the cosmos seems to be a topic of great importance indeed for me.