Wanting to See

The back door to our home was always working fine. It opened and shut smoothly day-in, day-out, no problem. And then it didn’t. As time went on, it started to require more force to close the door. It seemed like it happened gradually, but then again, maybe not. Perhaps it just happened all of a sudden. Eventually, we ended up using more and more force to shut the door. How this came about, I could not tell you. In fact, I thought, maybe it had been that way for most of the time we were living there – could it be that I only just started noticing it?

The mind is tricky. As numerous studies have demonstrated, memories can fade or be recreated depending on the day or occasion. In any case, we began to live with that door behaving badly, sometimes even leaving it slightly ajar to avoid the effort and the noise, but of course we needed to exercise caution lest one of our cats pulled off one of their disappearing acts!

The funny thing is that when it started happening I didn’t really even question it. And looking back, whenever I experienced it, I must have been going somewhere: literally and figuratively. Literally, I was either rushing in or rushing out taking out the trash, bringing up shopping bags from a Costco run, on my way to take a drive, etc. And figuratively, as in my thoughts: I’ve got big things to do; big things to take care of; anything else is a nuisance and needn’t be trifled with…and this door is a mere trifle. I counseled my wife that in order to get the door closed, she should “put some shoulder into it.”

But then one day, all of a sudden, I looked at that door anew. I opened it and examined the hinges in the frame. I saw that a few of the screws were loose and as I closed the door partway, I could see the hinge detach itself from the door frame. I then slowly closed the door completely and as the door was about to latch, I pushed the door in towards the frame so that the hinge would remain flush against the wood. This allowed me to close the door smoothly. Wow… so that’s what it felt like to have a working door… I wasn’t crazy. There had actually been a time that this worked properly! I then looked at the screws once again and they were neither flat nor Phillips nor hex. Rather they were a star-shaped screw, a style I was not familiar with. I rummaged through my toolboxes and luckily was able to find a few star-headed bits. After selecting one, I plugged it into a screwdriver. I proceeded to tighten the screws on the hinge to the frame and was then able to close the door smoothly, this time with no pressure whatsoever. All done in 10 seconds flat!

It would have been over but the next day, I got a bonus. I was able to observe how the condition must have manifested in the first place. My wife was doing a workout with cables and she attached them to the top of that very same door! She had done this countless times before, but I had thought nothing of it. I certainly didn’t connect the door not shutting properly because of those cables. But I realized in that moment her pulling on those cables as she did her exercises was the reason that over time the door literally became unhinged!

So that’s the whole play: Acts 1, 2 and 3. Basically I experienced an issue, proceeded to live with the issue, nearly gaslighting myself that the issue may have always been there even from the beginning, until somehow I woke up and actually looked. I also think there was an undercurrent of I’m no good at this household maintenance stuff; I’ll have to call in a professional and that will cost $$; so my mind didn’t even want to go there. In the end, however, awareness or curiosity or maybe simply choosing to give a damn, won out and I was eventually able to resolve the problem with very little effort. It was just a matter of wanting to see.