You know what I hate about change? It’s so frustratingly hard and completely lacking in fun. It seems like it should be simple, right? Decide what needs to happen, and then just do it.
Easy peezy.
Of course, it never is.
You know what else should be easy? Doing the laundry. It’s a simple process. Water on, soap in, cloths in, door closed, wait till the buzzer makes that annoying sound, cloths out, put in dryer, put fabric softener dryer sheet thingy in dryer, clean out lint trap, close door, set timer, turn on, wait till buzzer makes that annoying sound, pull out cloths, put in basket, carry to bedroom, dump on bed, fold cloths, put in proper cloths holding place.
Easy peezy.
But it never is. There is always the one sock you can’t find. The pair of underwear that fell between the washer and dryer during the transition phase that you just can’t reach because your arm is one inch too short and you have to get a hanger or a stick or a tree fairy or anything else small that can reach in and grab it. The shirt that will not iron out smooth even if you used a steam roller on it. The stack of cloths you had finally folded perfect for a change that you accidently knocked off the bed as you reached for another item of clothing and had to refold all over again.
Between that and picking out all the remnants of the tissue that I had left in my pocket that shredded itself onto every item of clothing, or trying to get the grease stains off my favorite shirt because my wife left her chapstick in her jeans and neither one of us bothered to check before sticking it in the wash machine.
But you know what I hate most?
Washing my wife’s bras.
I don’t hate the bras. I like them. Actually, I pretty much only like what they are designed to hold. I don’t actually have any feelings about the bras themselves. But I have developed a theory about bras.
It’s called the Brazier Entanglement Theory and it goes like this.
If you put one bra in the wash, it will some how wrap itself around itself and some random long sleeve shirt, tying both into a wrinkled mess.
If you put two or more bras in the wash, no matter how you separate them in the layers of clothing, they will find each other and knot themselves together, along with at least three other pieces of clothing, so tightly that only God himself has any chance at all of getting them apart without tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time.
None of the other clothing items do this. Only braziers. It defies all logic and reason. I’m convinced it’s a fundamental law of quantum mechanics distinct, but closely related to, quantum entanglement.
Just not nearly as cool or as useful.
And it happens every time. Every. Single. Time.
No amount of clever arranging or organizing the clothing in the machine makes any difference at all.
I’ve told lots of people this theory. One lady responded that if I would simply clasp them together in the wash, this wouldn’t happen.
“Please… what does she know???” I said in my head as I pretended to take her advice seriously and thanked her for the suggestion.
I mean really, a woman knowing how to properly take care of womanly garments? Better than me? A man? Who doesn’t wear them?
Ignoring her completely, I went back home and continued to kick the laundry tire for a long time. One day they had so knotted together with every other piece of clothing in the laundry, I was literally able to grab one item of clothing and pull out the entire load. I stood there over the wash machine and spent half an hour pulling everything apart.
It was at that moment that it occurred to me…
“What if I clasp them before I put them in the wash?” as if it had been my own very clever idea and not stolen from the nice lady who had kindly tried to help me.
So the next time, I did that very thing.
Not a single item of clothing was tangled. No shirts in a bra. No bra-on-bra action. In fact, since I’ve started doing that, I’ve only had a couple minor episodes of entanglement.
If only I’d known sooner.
Pride is such a fickle thing. Our ego wants so hard to keep us from change that it blinds us through our pride to alternative avenues to anything. It makes change not just hard, but completely undesirable.
I didn’t want to listen to that lady, because then I would have to admit that she had considered something that I hadn’t. And if I took her advise, and it worked, then I would have to admit that she was also correct and I wasn’t. That her way was better than mine.
And I hate to be wrong. Being wrong suggests that I am less capable than I thought I was. It makes me look less than I am and my ego wants to keep me puffed up and looking sharp. Never letting me look bad, and never letting me appear to be flawed and in need of help.
Change is hard because in order to become a better person, or remove flawed habits and patterns of behavior, we have to recognize these very things, and believe them. Be willing to admit to ourselves that I was my own problem. I have to be willing to see that I don’t have to be better and smarter than everyone else at everything every time.
But more importantly, I have to be ok with it. I have to be ok with it and have it not bother me at all when someone else succeeds faster than me, or succeeds where I failed, without making excuses or putting down their success.
Change requires the complete destruction of our hubris and egoist desires. If we were to examine every time we showed evident flaws of character, we would see that every event was a direct result of extreme selfishness on our part. Our selfish need to be seen a specific way, or to be a specific thing that just isn’t true or real.
Recognizing that these perceptions just don’t matter removes such a huge burden from our lives. So much stress and angst just disappears.
And the thing is, once the change happens, we look back and wonder why that was so hard and ask ourselves why we didn’t do this sooner. We can be so close to the problem that we can’t see the solution. We can be so close to the problem that we can’t see that, usually, we are the problem and the answers were right there the whole time waiting to be clasped together.
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