Episode #2: Spider-Man's Pause

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Good morning, Liam.

Sometimes Spider-Man moves so fast, you barely see him.

But it’s what he does before he moves that I remember most.

It happened one rainy night near Queensbridge. There’d been a break-in at a small electronics repair shop. Not big enough to make the news, but the kind of place that matters to people who fix instead of throw away.

Spider-Man followed the alert down into a back alley, with slick pavement, flickering streetlamp, dumpsters pressed tight against brick walls. The thieves were still there, three of them, huddled near the shop’s open door, arguing over what to grab next.

He crouched on the rooftop above, ready to strike.

Then he stopped.

A breeze shifted. A cat hissed and darted into a drainpipe. One of the thieves suddenly turned, scanning the rooflines. Not just petty crooks. Nervous. Trained. Maybe armed and dangerous.

Spidey took one breath.

He didn’t leap. Didn’t talk. Didn’t show himself. He paused.

He closed his eyes for just a second, just long enough to hear more clearly. The static hum of a walkie-talkie. The tension in one man’s footsteps. The uneven rhythm in another’s breath, like fear. One of them was bluffing.

That pause gave him everything.

He dropped down behind the last man, silent as the wind, webbed his hands in a blink. The others spun around but they were too late. A web shot up and yanked a pipe from the wall, sending it crashing behind them like thunder. They flinched. Spidey moved. In three seconds flat, all three were on the ground, wrapped tight like Christmas packages.

He didn’t say anything clever. He just looked at the old shop where the tools were still hanging on hooks, nothing stolen. He nodded once.

Then he was gone.

Not the flashiest takedown. But maybe one of his best.

The thing that made it work wasn’t strength. It was the pause. That breath between danger and action.

Pause. Notice. Return to what is really happening..

And remember—Noticing is half the battle.

Love,

Grandpa