A couple of days ago, probably Friday, I was grabbing a measuring cup out of one of our drawers when I noticed that the drawer had water in it, as did the drawers above and below it, as did the counter above them. I cleaned them all. I took everything out of all of those drawers and washed practically all of them. I took everything off the counter and cleaned it, too. The most troubling thing, however, was not how much work I had to do to clean up the mess; it was how the mess was created in the first place.
It was a total mystery. It told my family members, and none of us had any idea, and very few guesses, where that water came from. And it came back, prompting me to clean the counter again. We suspected the dish rack. We tried some experiments and made some adjustments. We thought we had fixed it, but the water came back. We suspected the dishwasher. We watched the dishwasher, guessing that maybe, when the dishwasher drained itself into the sink, maybe some of that water splashed onto the counter. We watched, but the splashing was minimal, and the counter was soaked anyway. We kept drying the counter and the water kept coming back unexplainably day after day.
Eventually, we discovered the problem. When the dishwasher is hooked up to the sink, the faucet leaks a little bit. The water from the faucet pools on the lip of the sink and then spills over onto the counter. The problem has finally been identified, and a temporary solution is already in place. Now, all we have to do is fix an occasionally leaky faucet, but this experience probably has a lesson or two in it, waiting for me to find them.
I am ashamed to admit how frustrated I was with the mysteriously reappearing water. There were times when, out of dismay and surprise, I came pretty close to swearing. It's incredible how discouraged I got with a relatively minor problem. I should have tried to maintain a better attitude and a more long-term perspective. I was confident that we would find the source of the problem and that we would find a solution to it. In the meantime, now that we were aware there was a problem, we could stay on top of it. We could keep checking the counter regularly and keep mopping up the water whenever it appeared. It wasn't a big deal. At least, it shouldn't have been.
And it doesn't really seem like a big deal now. Yes, it's a serious problem, and it could cause a lot of damage and cost us a lot of money. But, with our temporary solution in place, and actually working, fixing the actual problem with the sink doesn't feel like a high priority, and the previously mysterious water problem doesn't cause me any stress anymore. It feels like the problem has been solved, even though it really hasn't been solved yet.
Life is full of problems, big and small, and some of them bother us more than others. This one, which created a lot of work, didn't seem to make any sense, and kept coming back despite everything we did about it, really frustrated me. Perhaps it's true that problems seem less daunting when we understand them, but we shouldn't let a mysterious problem interfere with our tranquility. We should learn to be patient.
Yet, we shoudn't be too patient, especially with short-term solutions. It would be easy for me to take this band-aid solution and leave it at that, when what I should really do is take a closer look at the root of them problem and solve it at its source. It's not enough to just treat the symptoms of a problem; We also need to address the cause. We can live with the problems we can't solve, but we really should permanently solve the problems we can.
This mysterious water experience has been a trial for me, and that trial isn't completely over, but I have already learned a few valuable lessons from it. I just hope that I remember these lessons when it's time to apply them to my next trial.
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