The preacher suggested to “take every thought captive.” That is, errant thoughts have no place in our lives. Get rid of them.
Unfortunately, those unwelcome thoughts, over time, can become institutionalized as we spend years trying to uproot them.
So, what to do?
This business of taking every wayward, niggling thought captive is a tough nut to crack.
To capture an elephant or another large wild beast, one might dig a hidden pit covered with branches.
To capture a bee or wasp, one might place a pheromone-attracting substance in an inescapable test tube.
A fly just landed–
One of my best friends will have double knee replacement surgery in three days. In addition, he has a heart condition that compromises his situation. He is not himself since he is highly medicated for pain.
He was frustrated at his current condition. He explained, “You’re used to being who you are. All of a sudden, you’re not who you are.”
The fly had landed–it was a difficult thought that landed.
So–how to take this thought captive? Or is it errant at all?
And how to trap–and dispel–the next errant thought?
Of all the possible ways there might be to build a piece of Ikea furniture, there is only one correct way. Like pockmarked two-lane blacktop, there are plenty of demoralizing instruction-reading and brain-teasing, spatially-challenging pitfalls on the path to discover that One Correct Way.
I judge the quality of the assembly job by how many parts are left over afterwards. Each piece of Ikea hardware is inevitably an exotic, one-of-a-kind design, fasteners otherwise appearing only on a Mars lunar rover.
This time there was one ungainly fastener with a screw head, a swiveling joint in the middle, ending with a bulbous protrusion that looked like a spare part from a Triceratops. So whatever would I do with this extra shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter thing? Humph! I wondered how much of my money they had wasted by mistakenly enclosing this surplus part in my furniture kit!
Then it dawned on me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had this shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter left over! Maybe this was a vital part that I should have installed in my prized construction—had I suffered a concentration lapse and lost my way through the instructional pictographs? I feared this piece of dinosauric-appearing hardware—now missing from my construction—might render my piece of furniture too dangerous to use, an oversight that might cause a painful finger pinch or even a fatal collapse upon a favorite family pet!
Search as I might through the booklet of instructions, there was no hope of finding where the missing part belonged.
And there was no doubt what had to be done.
Retrieving a generous length of rope from the garage, I lashed my assembled furniture with the cord, first lengthwise, then sideways, then diagonally. I yanked and knotted the rope tight so there was no possibility that the omission of the missing part could cause bodily harm.
As I lashed down the final ungainly cord while on my belly beneath the chest of drawers, I noticed a hole. It was a hole designed to perfectly fit the missing shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter, which now lay uselessly upon the assembly instructions. The blood drained first from my head, then from my limbs. I would have to disassemble the entire piece of furniture to insert the missing part.
There was no way I would do that.
Upon returning the still rope-trussed furniture to Ikea the next day, the salesperson asked for the reason for its return.
“Defective,” I answered in a word.
“I’m sorry,” the salesperson responded, thinking I was referring to the furniture.
“Defective,” I repeated, not bothering to tell her that I was referring not to the furniture.
Edgar blamed a faulty alarm clock for oversleeping, causing him to miss his usual train. He would have to wait a full 20 seconds for the next train to arrive. It was a waste of his precious time, something that would surely be noticed by his boss. He valued his job because in this economy, not everyone enjoyed the privilege of working a whole ten-minute workday. He had come to enjoy his position as a dirt inspector, a highly respected vocation in the world of wheelbarrows, where subterranean housing is the construction de rigueur. He was proud that even though he was only nine months old, he had already worked at the job for four months, nearly half his life.
Life in wheelbarrow Nano-World, where everything—including time—is measured in 1:48 “O” model railroad scale, had not always been rosy for Edgar. Born into the low-rent Wheelbarrow Handle District, he had moved through the ranks of the working class to the much smoother-riding Rubber Wheel District.
At the “O” Scale Wheelbarrow Universe Fair (OSWUF), wheelbarrows from far-flung regions convene for their annual pilgrimage. Wheelbarrow communities tie up alongside one another, throwing up temporary bridges, and the seven-hour long party begins, the full vacation time allotted to a wheelbarrow citizen. A gigantic wheelbarrow is at the center, where the two top contending wheelbarrow football teams may compete for as long as a mind-boggling 4 minutes to win Wheelbarrowland’s championship.
“O” scale wheelbarrow communities have, by necessity, restricted populations, so it’s hard to find a mate if the girl next door doesn’t strike one’s fancy. It’s not surprising that at the championship football game, a roasted corn vendor named Rosabelle caught Edgar’s eye. Time and again Edgar purchased the butter-slathered corn, tipping her generously until he ran out of cash. It was she that, at game’s end, his belly aching from too much roasted corn, helped him home to his own wheelbarrow. Before the OSWUF concluded, she had rented a spare bedroom in Edgar’s wheelbarrow from a neighbor, and the rest, as they say, is wheelbarrow history. After patiently courting her for nearly 8 days, they married. Two children had followed (one of them born prematurely, a mere five day pregnancy), requiring him to add bedrooms to his second basement subterranean dwelling.
“O” scale wheelbarrow dwellers are different people from you and me, but they are not stupid people. Edgar’s job as a professional dirt inspector provides him time to contemplate the world beyond his wheelbarrow, the Standard Time World that houses you and me. To Edgar, it’s a slow motion world, where all moves at a snail’s pace.
Life in the Standard Time World defies reason. In the Standard Time World, Edgar struggles to fathom that his current lifespan of 1-½ years would be stretched to 48 times that length—perhaps as many as a mind-boggling 80 years in Standard Time World!
With this much Methuselah-scale time on their hands, he reckons Standard Time World dwellers could do so much more with it. Why would Standard Time World residents conceive of ever more ways to waste their precious time with trivialities, warfare and petty selfish indulgences?
A devout worshiper, Edgar turns his voice to God. “The gift of time,” he says, as he utters his evening prayers, “is one of the greatest gifts of all. Help me to value the months, the hours and the minutes; I am grateful for the 18 months of life that You may give me. Help me to use my moments well.”
“And, Lord,” he adds, “help the Standard Time World dwellers to use theirs well, too.”
The black-shirted salespeople crowding the T-Mobile telephone’s display floor at this year’s county fair resembled a flock of hungry crows. They had descended to hunt for the morsels that would make their day—fresh customers to purchase profitable cell phone contracts. The trouble was that there were no customers to be found. Either this busy team of sales crows had already choked out demand by peddling their wares to every passerby, or, like nervous insects, the customer population had fled the area, taking flight before a predator.
I’d put money on the latter scenario. Likewise, I won’t buy a redundant, overhyped electronic gizmo.
My life suffers from simpler needs. I crave low-tech solutions to low-tech problems.
Case in point–bathroom odors. I’m tired of pinching out candles that were lit by a previous toilet occupier. The candle flames may have been burning for hours, threatening to melt counter tops and depleting oxygen supplies to a prized co-inhabiting African Grey Parrot.
Dangerous stuff. I need Febreze, the safe and pleasantly-scented odor-killing product.
When it was first introduced to the public, the odor-eliminating product Febreze was a sales flop. It certainly did its job, however. Tests proved that it wiped out unpleasant odors unlike any other product. However, it was a difficult sell because the people who needed it most weren’t interested. They had become so acclimated to the stinky smells embedded in their carpet by incontinent pets that they sensed no objectionable odors. Why would they need an odor killer?
The customers who did decide to try Febreze didn’t realize how effective it was. It destroyed odors so completely they thought the product had done nothing at all. It left no smell behind. There was no smell at all. (There was also no residue and no potential lethal house-burning-down candle flame.)
So what allowed Febreze to eventually succeed? The future of Febreze turned on one small change in the product’s formula. They added a fragrance that the human nose could detect, so that, after using Febreze, whether upon nasty pet carpet or pleasant-enough households, things smelled fresh. Never mind that the added fresh-smelling fragrance held no other functional purpose than to mark its presence.
People sensed it was doing something because it now left an irresistibly beautiful scent behind. Things smelled clean, so the product must be effective.
I, too, have become a convert, so I’ll buy a case of Febreze. I’ll put a can in every bathroom and two spare cans beneath each sink. I’ll put one in the car and in my shoe closet, just for good measure.
At next year’s county fair, I’ll square off by inhabiting a booth perched directly across from T-Mobile’s techno-cornucopia. My humble crew of three will be-shirt ourselves with lavender, blue and pink t-shirts with the word Febreze in-scripted across the front. We’ll challenge one of the top carriers in the telecommunications industry with hope instead of pandering to redundant and ubiquitous telecommunications technology.
There’s hope for our bathrooms. There’s hope for our odors.
There’s hope to change the most banal of life’s daily needs, transforming befouled air by converting it into odor-obliterated, fresh-scented freely-breathable air.
Right now, I need that more than another fancy, feature-driven piece of technology.
