It has been pointed out to me by more than one person in my life that I have an extraordinary capacity for acceptance. This is not a compliment. It’s a nice way of saying that I put up with way too much crap. I don’t really know why, but I unquestioningly accept life’s little inconveniences as my due. I pride myself on my patience and my fortitude. Well, I did until yesterday.
Beside my stoicism and my children, my kitchen is my pride. My dad redesigned and remodelled our kitchen in 2007 and I have truly treasured it, especially since his death a few years ago. But the kitchen sink has been a reliable source of irritation, if not irrigation, ever since.
While water would, from time to time, stream from the pipes underneath the sink like the Zambesi’s rapids, it would only ever ooze from the taps in a frustrating trickle…filling the sink slower than the current growth of the economy. Over the years, we’ve made some half-hearted attempts to attend to the problem. But usually only once we finally found ourselves wading to the dustbin through a small lake, fed by the rushing waterfall spilling from the cupboard under the sink.
So despite the ministrations of my husband and three or four plumbers over the years, we never could get to the bottom of the problem. Until two days ago.
Two days ago, after another inundation of Biblical scale, the Picasso of plumbers strode into our kitchen with manful purpose and an impressive assortment of pipes. And he fixed it! Not the usual kind-of, sort-of, that-should-do-you-for-a-while fixed it. No, he properly, expensively, ten-year-guarantee fixed it! Which is why I spent my Heritage Day public holiday in a state of exhilarated astonishment, opening and closing my kitchen taps with glee. I even opted to wash my dishes in the basin rather than the machine, just because I could.
And every time I looked at those shiny, fully-functional taps I thought of how much time I’d wasted standing in front of the sink, waiting for the water to sluggishly make its way from pipe to basin. How many times had I just opted to boil the kettle and fill up the sink with hot water that way? How much money, and time, and water had been wasted by those frequent leaks? And why? Simply because we had put up with it.
It got me thinking about how much else in life I put up with. Minor details that don’t seem important enough to bother with. Things that could and should work better but don’t, just because fixing them seems like too much of an effort. And because expecting things to work like they should would be too much for me to expect from life, surely? I realised, as I saw my own reflection grinning idiotically at me from the taps yesterday, that small problems really do matter and that they deserve my attention as much as big problems do – whether in my home or in my life.
I have always wondered about which recreational narcotics could have led the Beatles to write and record an entire song about fixing a hole where the rain came in. Now I get it. And like Paul McCartney, from now on I’ll be taking “the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday”.
* Amanda Spohr is a Reputation Management Executive at BrightRock.
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