It was just a random July afternoon in the summer of 2001. As usual it was impossibly humid, and as anyone in the Ohio Valley knows, it was just one of those days that you pray for sundown, for the release from the disgusting grip of thick air. I was gone working one of my two jobs, likely enjoying the free window-unit air conditioning somewhere. But two of my roommates were off teaching me a lesson, and sweating their asses off in the process.
“…instead of just whizzing on the floor, which would be the easy decision for him, he cobbled together another plan…”
Who knows how it got decided that we needed a dining room table. If I were to guess, I’d say it was Seth who came up with the idea first. But all I know (as the story was told to me later while taking in a porch swing session) is that it ended with the two of them buying a beat-up table and chair set at the local Goodwill and walking it home, across downtown Norwood, Ohio in the dead of this horrible heat. Sure they knew it was an idiotic plan, that it wasn’t ideal. Sure they were glad when an old farmer spotted them (almost home) and gave them a lift in his pickup. But the point of this, the lesson that seven years later still strikes me deeply, is that neither of them cared about the obstacles. They had something they wanted (a proper dining room set), and it didn’t matter what stood in the way.
My dog even seems to understands this. Locked inside my office for an afternoon, away from his normal means of communication, he doesn’t back down from a challenge. Normally he lets us know he needs to go outside on a business trip by ringing a set of bells on the back door. In the office, however, he’s a full floor and one closed door away. So instead of just whizzing on the floor, which would be the easy decision for him, he cobbled together another plan: smack the crap out of the doorstop with his paw (BOING!) until I turned down my music enough to pay attention. He had a goal and worked with what he had at hand (or paw, as in this case) to achieve it. He didn’t even give up on the first three or four tries to get me to notice, either.
I’m amazed. Be it my dog or my friends, I have impressive examples of ingenuity and resolve in my life that I am inspired by. Sure, they’re humble stories, but it seems as if as of late it is just these very small, seemingly trivial tasks in my life that I’m finding harder and harder to gather up the will-power (or courage?) to attack.
I never want to become that apathetic, lazy, uninspired man who whines at the thought of fixing a problem or stops at the first hurdle or kink in the plan. I don’t want to put off fixing that air leak in the door until “later” so that I can watch TV, or make excuses for why I’ve been remiss in consistent 6-day-a-week exercise. The list of problems, both small and large, grow longer every day. Yet somehow I’ve slipped into a pattern whereby the list of excuses is challenging it in length.
If I want that dining room table badly enough, then dammit I’ll find some way to get it home. And peeing on the carpet isn’t the answer, either. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes. The first step is kick-starting the will.
