Life’s biggest challenge is doing the little things

Life’s biggest challenge is doing the little things
David Trinko dtrinko@limanews.com - 09.07.2007
There’s a safety pin in a urinal at the office.
I’m not sure why it rests in the toilet water there or how it hasn’t flushed down the drain. I don’t know why it remains there at least six months after it arrived.
I take that second part back. I know why it’s remained; no one wants to reach into the toilet water to retrieve it and throw it away.
It really wouldn’t be that difficult for me to pick it out and toss it in the garbage can. I could wash my hands thoroughly afterward. It wouldn’t be that difficult for someone else to do it either. Yet it remains there, and the only time I think about it is when I’m doing what you do in front of a urinal.
Recently I realized how many safety pins are in the urinals of my life.
They’re these simply solved problems that never get addressed. They seem hardly worth the effort, but they bother you over time. You waste hours thinking, “I should work on that some day.”
Some just take some elbow grease. For instance, I like to keep copies of old bills. I have a good filing system, but I’m not always good at keeping up with it. If I file a bill as soon as I pay it, there’d be no hard work to it. Instead, I tend to grow piles of bills and have to take an hour to file three months’ worth of old bills. These piles of bills grow around the floor in my home office.
Others are changing your habits. We go out to eat way too often, especially considering everyone in our house save the newborn baby is a decent cook. There’s a stocked freezer and cupboard. The food’s not always that great when you hit a fast-food place, and the atmosphere will never rival gathering around our dinner table.
Another safety pin is my personal fitness. I’m fairly healthy, but I could take better care of myself. I’m not sure I like the looks of doubt when I tell people I weighed 140 pounds my senior year of high school. I could easily spend 15 minutes a day using those weights I’ve lugged from town to town over the last 10 years.
My e-mail habits are bad. I’ll receive e-mail and file it away until I have time to write a good answer. Then it may be weeks before I respond to a dear friend from college. Real friends don’t wait months before answering e-mail.
I should do more to live my faith. It’s good to go to church and try to take what you learn into your everyday life. It’s better to go out, volunteer and share your gifts with others.
I don’t see my parents enough. I moved back to Ohio to spend more time with them, yet I might not see them for a month or two in a row. I really should make that 40-minute trip at least once a month.
I should tell more people that I love them. Sure, they should know by my actions. It never hurts to say it though, and there are few things in life as sweet as hearing it.
Sometimes the easiest things to change in life become the hardest ones to do.
I seriously doubt I’ll put my hand into the urinal anytime soon. Maybe it’s best that it stays there as a reminder of all of these other safety pins in the urinals of life that need just one thing: action.