The Wheels on the ...Luggage (??) Go Round and Round

I wish I had a youtube video of my nephew Thomas singing "the wheels on the bus go round and round". Unfortunately, you are denied -or spared, depending on your point of view- the doting-auntie videos. But anyway.... that's why the song is on my mind.

It's a long story. It always is, with me. The new-ish purple luggage got a workout this week, as I traveled to Pennsylvania to see a subset of the siblings and a smaller-yet subset of their children. As I tugged my little suitcase (the one that arrived in PA. Don't ask.) through the airport, I marveled at how easy the process was. Then I felt silly for marveling, because of course everyone has suitcases that roll these days.

And of course, I did too - even before the purple luggage. Except, like many things in my former life, it limped along not quite right. The former luggage lost a wheel on the floor of the airport in Switzerland. This did not happen recently. But all the other pieces of that luggage worked fine, so that piece got replaced in the attic. The thing is, that was the most usefully-sized piece of luggage. So time after time after time, I would haul out the broken suitcase and use it, with only one wheel. It still, I reasoned, held clothes perfectly well, and it's not as though I'm not strong enough to actually pick my suitcase up, as we did in the olden days.

And yet, it was embarrassing and silly and, on some level, just plain lazy to keep using that luggage. Now I have new purple luggage that rolls along quite nicely, thank you. And, being me, I must make this into a metaphor. How many other tiny little things aren't quite right that in the end take up an enormous amount of energy? Fixing them..replacing them... whatever it takes, would be a binary process. Do it and it's done. Dealing with them, accommodating them, working around the limitations they impose, is an ongoing, circular process. And worse, accommodation and limitation become the steady-state. It starts to take longer before it even occurs to you (ummm,.... that would be ME) that the situation is reparable at all.

I firmly resolve to tackle a few of these little things this week. I will report back!