Sometimes You Just Have to Do It

 

 

I’m pleased to make time for golf as a hobby that allows me to have fun amid my demanding responsibilities as an economic consultant and a family man. But, taking several hours out of every week for this pastime is not without cost. So, practically, on Friday mornings when I snag an early morning tee time so as to get back into the office in time to do a day’s worth of work before the weekend begins, I’m also racing through other pressing to-do’s. Playing partners for whom an 8am tee time is early for them are astounded to hear that not only did I get to the course early to stretch, but I also did a full workout (run and lift), house chores, time-sensitive desk work, and grocery run. 

Needless to say, I do this with severe haste. So even a small hiccup can create a big problem in staying on schedule. For example, for a while my grocery store was still closed many minutes later than their stated 6am open because security hadn’t shown up yet, leaving me and the other early birds cursing the employees for not setting their alarms and management for allowing such tardiness to become a pattern. 

Earlier this month, though, the grocery store delay had nothing to do with the grocery store. Instead, when I hopped in the car, after an overnight rain, and turned the wipers on to clean off the windshield, one of the wipers flew right off its arm. I made it safely to the store a few minutes later, and decided to figure out how to snap the wiper back on before going into the store. Not being very mechanically inclined, and it being pitch dark, I fumbled around with great frustration for a full 10 minutes before successfully performing the task. Thankfully I was able to figure it out in the end, and 10 minutes isn’t much of a delay, and that morning I had enough buffer that it didn’t adversely affect my ability to get to the course on time. But it was still quite frustrating to take on an unexpected task, do poorly at it, and have my tight timeline thrown akilter by it all. 

What I didn’t have the luxury of was to throw in the towel and leave the task undone. I was certainly tempted to complain that it wasn’t fair that I’d carefully planned my morning and this was throwing things off, to lament that this wasn’t a task I was particularly good at, that it was dark out, and why did the wiper have to fall off in the first place anyway since it wasn't my fault that that had happened. No, sometimes you just have to suck it up and do it. And, you have to do it without anyone helping you, or consoling you that it sucks you have to do it, or congratulating you on a good job after you’re done. 

I subject you to this long account of a mundane event because it is indicative of a parenting philosophy that is important to what I want my kids to understand as they prepare to go out into the world as fully formed adults. In a sense, what it means to be an adult is that there is no one tasked with bailing you out when there’s a task you don’t want to or just plain forget to do. I will admit that my mom picked up my dirty laundry and washed my dirty dishes for longer than was probably helpful for the kid version of me; it took until I was 16 and they all went on vacation while I stayed home for summer league basketball to realize that if I left a dirty dish in the sink and a dirty shirt on the floor in the morning, I would return in the evening and those items would still be there. But, however long it took for me to learn that lesson, I did learn it, and I learned it by having to deal with the fact that the task needed to be done and I hadn't done it so it was left to be done. 

We are lucky that we live in relative material comfort. We want our kids to have a deep sense of fairness rather than be fatalistic, and to express frustration rather than stifle it. We want them to feel celebrated when they do a good job and comforted when they do something hard. However, in life sometimes the wiper flies off your car and you just have to figure out how to pop it back on. It doesn’t matter that that’s not fair, or anticipated, or something we’re good at, or that there’s no one around to cheer us on. It doesn't matter that the problem was not of our doing, and that not only were we not at fault but there is no one to blame or otherwise seek out to make it right. We just have to do it ourselves. Sounds harsh, but sometimes life is.