Self-awareness Drifts Away
It is amazing what a person can get used to. For example, we have one of those single handle faucets in our kitchen. Push it to the left and out comes hot water. To the right we get cold water. When the handle is straight down it’s supposed to be off. Not in our case. Straight down yields a steady stream of water. The off position is really about 7 or 8 o’clock. The first time my dad (a handy man extraordinaire) visited our house, the faucet drove him so crazy he felt the need to fix it for us. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the right parts and it soon reverted to it’s old off position. We don’t think twice about it anymore. We simply adjust our behavior and turn it off in the wrong place.
In addition, the timer on our clothes dryer moves counter-clockwise about 75% of the time when it’s supposed to move clockwise. It’s been doing this so long we simply adjust and rarely think about the problems it causes. Certainly, the obvious solution is to get a new timer. Instead, we ignore the inconvenience and accept imperfection.
I can hear you now–”What an idiot. Just get these things fixed.” Okay, point taken. Before you’re too harsh on me, though, consider how many ways all of us do this kind of thing. I’m not just talking about faucets and dryers here. We do this in every area of our lives. For example, how many times do we overeat and don’t really know why? How often do we explode in rage we can’t seem to control? In what ways do we avoid confrontation with our spouse just to keep the peace?
Each of these are ways we make adjustments to things that are broken in our lives. Rather than looking seriously at the emotional baggage we carry that makes us overeat, we just ignore the problem and stuff our face. Instead of dealing directly with the triggers that send us into a rage we choose to repeat the same poor behavior week after week. When we could address relational and communication problems with our spouse, we choose, instead to live with imperfection and alienation.
In Melinda Haynes’ novel, Willem’s Field, one of the characters thinks to herself, “This is how we live our lives–so caught up in work, our self-awareness drifts away.” When self-awareness drifts away we are doomed to adjust to the brokenness within us just as I have learned to adjust to my broken faucet and dryer timer. We accept unnecessary inconvenience, if not major affliction. We stop thinking about the problems, yet continue our bad habits or dysfunctional behavior.
I’ve learned to ignore the problems of my faucet and dryer. The more important question is, “What emotional, spiritual, and behavioral problems have I learned to ignore?” What problems are you ignoring today?
Comments
Share your thoughts...
