So for a long time I had this annoying squeak that was happening on the driver side of my car. It would just squeak in a regular pattern. It was extremely annoying, it would not happen at slow speeds, only at freeway speeds. That squeak would at times drive me crazy and sometimes I would get so used to it that I would not even realize it was there. I would actually go through a long drive with this annoying squeaking sound accompanying me the entire time. I think I even found myself predicting when the squeak would occur. I could tell by the amount of vibration in the road when the squeak would occur. It was really distracting and soothing at the same time.
I never found the root cause. I suspect it was a toy of some sort crammed under the driver seat and when the freeway would cause vehicle to vibrate the squeak would kick in. I am not sure, the squeak went away one day never to return. I think the rubber in the toy, or perhaps the small plastic reed gave out due to overuse. The interesting thing is this. The sound was really annoying and distracting and secondly I put up with it because the small effort it would take for me to find and remove the culprit was never something I was willing to do.
So this is interesting. I wonder how many things are in our lives that are really annoying, yet will waste countless hours and distractions putting up with it because we do not want to do the initial effort of fixing it? How many relationships do we have were something annoying is going on between us, yet we will dance, duck, dive, dodge the real problem for years if not decades? Seriously, I have so many things like this in my life, it is funny. Simple things really. Just ridiculous.
For example, I had to turn my taxes in by October 15th. I fretted, moaned, complained, stressed and whined about it all year. I delayed and delayed up until the last minute. I finally just had to do it. Now there was some work involved, sure. It was a little painful, absolutely, but the fact is that I finished in 4 hours. So I must have spent the equivalent of 100 hours worrying about 4 hours of work. Sounds pretty stupid in hind sight.
How much time could we save in our lives by removing the annoying squeak? How much worry, stress, anxiety could we clean up with just a few hours of fixing some small issue? I have some things staring at me right now that cause me stress that would take probably less than 5 minutes to fix. I think I actually thought yesterday that my life was over because my office was a total disaster again. The fact is that it was not a disaster. It took me about 2 minutes to clean up today. So I spent the good part of yesterday feeling down and out to avoid 2 minutes of work!
Moral of the story – get rid of the annoying squeak! If you are doing something, or there is something that is causing you major anxiety than fix it!
Guy Reams
