eThoughts : Fixing a Hole

About seven months ago, my aging car and house began to reach a point that became impossible to ignore. I’ve been at this kind of place before and it is not something that I relish—finding honest and reliable people is like trying to find diamonds lying along the roadway, it just isn’t easy.

Buying a new car was the usual joke. Maybe I’m not too lucky—I’m dealing with a relatively small sample size, about nine or ten dealership experiences—but I think I’d rather be tortured. Wait, I already was. Okay, one experience was absolutely great, one was a complete and total lie, two were neutral, and the remaining five were hedgers. Hedgers don’t outright lie, they leave out information that will cost the consumer—and they do it as though they’re the best and most friendly people on the planet. Personally, I think the liars and the hedgers belong in a special reality, like something from the Twilight Zone, only real.

And then there’s the house. Doing the work myself was an option, but not one much worth exploring—I learned a long time ago that while I’m mostly capable, there is little reason to stretch the work out three or four times as long as hiring experts, not to mention the aggravation factor. There have been glitches to be sure, including needing to part ways with one so-called expert, but the work has been happening and it is looking good. I’ve got to stop though, as I’m trying to avoid becoming a feature article in the fictional magazine Poor House. Besides, my brain can no longer take spending my time thinking about style and color—including the proper sheen—of paint, cabinets, carpet, flooring, and things like drawer and door pulls. The project has altered my syntax in ways that could affect my entire personality—and my identity. Just what I need, an identity crisis during the year I turn 60. Okay, that was dramatic license, but let’s face it, if one is using muscles they’re not use to, at some point the muscles get fatigued (heck, at some point any kind of use will likely lead to fatigue). My home-improvement “muscles” are really fatigued and my musing “muscles” are begging for some exercise. But, as much as I prefer musing, there are things in our environment that beg for our attention. The Beatles’ song, Fixing a Hole captures it: “I’m fixing a hole where the rain comes in and stops my mind from wandering…” (that may not be an exact quote, but it’s got to be pretty close).

I’m not one to spend my life fixing stuff—geez, depending on how we define fixing, one could be permanently occupied with just trying to keep our stuff from falling apart—but at some point, our stuff begins to need attention so badly that it can interfere with the most avid of musers. That’s what finally happened, my attention was being wrenched to my stuff, and so I had to set aside my preferred mental modality to address my living environment. When our preferred mental modality is shifted off its usual perch, it is easy to start blaming what’s falling apart and/or our attention to it. Yep, I’m guilty, but at least I caught it.

In any case, our possessions are more than just status about how good we are at providing for basics like food, clothing, and shelter—it’s not just providing for, it’s also how well we do it—our possessions are reminders about the care and shape of our stewardship. Attending to our possessions may be a way to announce our care, it may be a way to announce our obsessive-ness, it may be a way to claim status, but our possessions are part of our mirror. When we look at those facets of ourselves reflected in our stewardship, we can be proud, we can rationalize, we can not care, but the mirror, sans the spin meister, is an accurate, if not complete, image—it is an appropriate tool, especially for noted tool-users. And our stewardship is not just about our tangible possessions like our living arrangements or our chosen pets, etc., but also about the intangible arrangements, like love and hurt. In either case, it may be worth remembering that it is not just what we can afford to get into, it is also what we can afford to maintain. And of those two beings, the need for maintenance can come upon us like a robber in the night, butting into our lives and nagging for attention.

Much as I hate to say it, especially as a male, sometimes we need to pay attention to the nagging. As a profoundly lazy person, I say pay attention upfront as that leaves a lot more free time in the long run. Besides, I hate it when I get clobbered as a result of my inattention—it may be inevitable in some measure, but in full measure it just leaves a lot of unnecessary bruises.