Going Slow with Dr. Low

A Little Oil Please

Anyone who knows me knows I'm not a handy-man by any means.  I don't like fixing things and I'm not good at fixing things so I put off household projects for as long as I can.  Even little simple tasks can overwhelm me; I just don't have the time, energy or interest in tackling them.  So what happens is I often let a minor problem get so bad that it's not working at all and then I get mad and want to buy a new one because I assume it's broken or too much work to fix it.

Twice in the last month I've been overwhelmed and discouraged by small things that I assumed were beyond repair and going to take a lot of time and money to fix or get a new one.  One was a padlock and the other my front door handle.  The padlock wasn't very old so I was angry at the manufacturer for making such a cheap piece of junk (I only paid a few dollars for it).  I was about to throw it in the garbage because it was so stiff the key wouldn't open it any more when the thought popped into my head to squirt a little oil in it.  Well, that's all it took - the cheap lock now works like a charm.   After several weeks of fighting with it and complaining about it now it opened and closed without a hitch.

Then yesterday I had the same thing happen with my front door handle which had become increasingly stiff over the last several months to the point where now we couldn't even open the front door at all and had to use the back door.  Our house is 10 years old so I wondered if I would just have to buy a new door handle for $50 or $60 but then the oil idea popped into my head again.  After weeks of avoiding the problem I finally took the door handle apart, played around with the contraptions for a while to figure out how they move and then squirted some oil in where I thought the gears weren't turning smoothly.  Sure enough, now the door handle works like a charm, probably better than it has in the 8 years we've lived here.

I do this too often in life.  Get mad and overwhelmed with the tiniest of things and avoid, procrastinate and ignore things I think are going to be too much work.  But, like my padlock and door handle, I often find in the end these things just needed a little attention, some oil, some TLC.  Yes, sometimes there truly are crises and things which are big and I need help or counseling or a big life-changing decision, but most of the time I just need to slow down, take a deep breath, take the door handle apart and tweak it a bit.  Like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, I just need a little oil to keep me moving forward.

What small thing can you do this weekend to help your life flow a bit more smoothly?


Dr. Rob Low is a Spiritual Life Coach with www.frombeginninngtoend.org.