AH! What a MESS!

I spilled an entire gallon of water into my refrigerator today. My initial response was to grab it and save it as it poured, in slow motion, from the top shelf down the back to soak each shelf beneath it and then rest in the bottom of the drawers on the bottom. I didn’t stop it though. I thought, “Oh good! Now my refrigerator is going to be clean!” My fridge is sort of old and worn out and though I’m a little obsessive with keeping things in order, I tend to laugh at the things lying around this place that I would refer to as “old crap”. This fridge certainly falls under the “old crap” category. The power went out the other day and apparently it was not a complete outage but a reduction in voltage. I peered into the fridge to look for something to remind me not to think about…well…anything…and I noticed that it looked much better in a low light setting. I’m actually thinking of putting some sort of a 3 way bulb in there so I don’t have to burn my eyes out during those late night hunts for food anymore. So it got me to thinking…(of course it did!) I realized that on many occasions, making a big mess helps us to take action. I could’ve gone another year or so without cleaning that fridge but now it is crystal clean and sparklingly beautiful!

Have you ever met anyone who hung on to an old relationship because breaking it off would be too painful? I have! In fact, I’ve even watched people hang on and on and on all the while knowing it wasn’t working but not wanting to take any action for fear of the pain. Next thing they know they wake up one day and have been cheated on and left anyway. This actually happens more often than I can even comment on. All I can think when this happens is “wait a minute! You can’t cheat on me! I didn’t like you first!”…BUT NO. You wake up one day and all of your food is rotten and your milk is spoiled because that refrigerator that you didn’t want to hurt by replacing it for a more efficient version of itself that could make you happy with its stainless steel exterior and cooler interior, has somehow decided to stop even trying to cool your food as it had originally promised because it just didn’t feel like working anymore.

The point is that a lot of time and pain can be spared when we stop putting Band-Aids and excuses on a household appliance in order to drag out its stay in our lives beyond its usefulness. Do we really need a gallon of water spilled on our heads to help us realize that even though it may be hard to lift in order to make room for a new one, 10 years down the road it’s going to feel even heavier and when we pull out our backs lifting it, we aren’t exactly going to feel quite as resilient as we do today. I think that if we were smart and we knew a mess was impending, we would do ourselves a huge favor to just blow that fridge up and start again.