“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” the shop foreman told us. We were half a day into our car trip from Salt Lake City to San Diego to visit a friend. It was a Saturday, and my partner Kathy’s Pinto hatchback had started running badly a short time before, outside of Cedar City, Utah. This was disconcerting because the car had had a complete servicing before we left. It was the early 1970s, and we were in our twenties. There was no internet or GPS, let alone cellphones. We had maps on paper and highway routes to follow. Cedar City is located relatively close to some beautiful Utah country—Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park. In the ’70s, its population was under 10,000. The town began in the mid-1800s when Mormon settlers sent some men from the town of Parowan to establish an iron works. Today, there are no iron works, and instead tourism and festivals help the economy. Cruising Main Street, we saw that Cedar City had a Ford dealership, and it turned out they were open on Saturday. This was good luck! The next large city was St. George, but it was 50 miles away. “Why can’t you help us?” we asked. The shop foreman explained that their “Pinto man” had the day off, and he had locked up his tool case. This was a problem because Pinto engines, made in Europe, were metric. No one else in the shop had metric tools. We wondered whether Pinto man could be contacted to at least unlock his tools—but the foreman said that according to the man’s wife, he had gone fishing, taking his keys with him. “Again, I’m sorry, but without a nineteen millimeter wrench, there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “He’ll be back on Monday.” Monday. A weekend in a motel in Cedar City, doing nothing? (And there was nothing to do on Sunday in Cedar City back then—believe me.) We cruised Main Street again, which reinforced the realization that without work, the car was not even going to make it to St. George, let alone back to Salt Lake. Surely, there had to be a 19-mm wrench somewhere in Cedar City. We stopped at a payphone and looked up auto parts in the Yellow Pages of the skimpy phone book that dangled on a chain from the shelf. No one was open. “We should look for a motel,” Kathy said. Then I remembered—on the way into town, I had seen a VW sign. Cedar City had a Volkswagen dealer. We drove into the parking lot. Someone was sweeping in the back. “We’re closed,” he said. “Is there anyone in the office at all who could help us?” I asked. Just then a man came out—he was a salesman catching up on work. I explained our difficulty and asked if they sold wrenches. He had us follow him to a room where they kept parts for sale. Wrenches hung from the wall, but one hanger was empty. I was getting the idea. We thanked him, sadly, and were on our way out when I saw a set of six wrenches in a locked display case on the wall. “Sir, do you think I could see that set of wrenches, just in case?” “Well, the set is pretty expensive,” he warned. Like I cared. Fast forward to the Ford dealership. We strode into the shop and up to the foreman. I held up the 19-mm wrench and said, “Do you think you can help us now?” If you’re familiar with car engines, you may have guessed that the problem had to do with a botched valve adjustment. Intake and exhaust valves allow the engine’s cylinders to breathe during combustion. If these valves aren’t adjusted to the right clearances, then the engine has problems.
1 Comment
At the time I posted about this, I wondered whether daily life would have a different pace if we paid attention only to hours, rather than to minutes, let alone seconds. The development of mechanical clocks allowed tracking of time during both day and night, and on cloudy days—a definite advantage over the sundial.
Much of my work life was run by deadlines. That’s not true now, but sometimes I still tend to behave and feel as though it is. I get over-invested in punctuality and making sure things are done “on time.” I almost never have a set schedule these days; my day planner is largely empty space. But that old drive lingers on. The drive is the problem, not setting a time or meeting an appointment. It’s about how I approach these set points. In 1970, Gestalt therapist Barry Stevens published a book titled Don't Push the River (It Flows by Itself). The title was arguably the best part. I have spent so much time pushing the river.
Either way, I still got to the hall. When I moved deliberately but without rushing, staying in the flow, I found my mind was already more at rest when meditation began.
Time passes, whether precisely measured or not. Sometimes we do need to work quickly or move swiftly—but we gain nothing when we translate that into feeling pressured, pushed, anxious, or rushed because of old habits. These tongue-in-cheek tips have been compiled from my 20 years of experience serving clients as a professional tax practitioner. I’m assuming that no huge inheritance is waiting in the wings. If it is, you may have to work harder to go broke.
If you are someone who grew up with a Western mindset, then you might likely strive to determine once and for all what is right and what is wrong, so that you can be in the right and can relax. You know the result of this quest: opinions differ. We don’t have to look far to see how this dichotomy between good and bad works on us. Social media and news media play us—and prey on us—by presenting events in a hyped-up, dramatic light. It’s easy to be agitated and upset constantly from viewing media. We just want it to stop—“it” being whatever the currently designated evil is. Things that have nothing to do with me are made my business. I am invited to be outraged by injustice, broken by tragedy, frightened by the actions of others, even terrified by the weather forecast—until the ad break, where I’m assured that with the right beer, a better cellphone, a new car, or a doctor’s prescription, I can be okay again. Chögyam Trungpa is using the light-and-dark analogy to attempt to explain a difference in perception—but it’s easy to misinterpret what he means. He does not mean that light and dark are the same thing. Everything does not exist in a monochromatic gray fog where anything goes. Bad acts and good acts do happen, and we can discern the difference. He also does not mean that light and dark never change. Looked at from high Earth orbit, we see that at any given moment, half the world is in darkness and half is in the light, but each area is continuously moving from one to the other. (Does this sound like Taoism? There’s a reason for that. Chinese Chan Buddhism, the originating tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism, incorporates much of the older Taoist philosophy.) The Buddha-Tao mindset invites us to view events in a dispassionate way: suspending judgment, preference, and conditioning, if only for a moment. By doing this, we can see what is happening without a knee-jerk reaction based on prior emotions, favorite ideas, childhood conditioning and beliefs—or on being manipulated by a party line or a media ad campaign.
One of the values I learned growing up was that repairing and restoring a damaged or broken item was preferable to tossing it out and buying something new. It’s also really satisfying to fix things. I want to share one small aspect of a recent experience I had when I assembled and installed a wall cabinet in our guest bathroom. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go through the whole process! The story has to do with repairing the wall on which the cabinet was to be mounted. This bathroom had been wallpapered before we owned the home with an attractive, old-style wall covering. Whoever did it knew how to do it right. Or so I thought. When I removed the towel bar from the wall, I found that the bar had been installed prior to the wallpapering, and instead of removing all the hardware, the installer had just cut around it.
The wall damage had to be fixed, but we no longer have any extra wallpaper with this pattern. Fortunately, some of the wall would be hidden behind a backboard of the new cabinet—so I set out to make some patches. In the hidden area, I located, cut out, and carefully peeled away matching pieces of wallpaper about 1/4" to 3/8" larger than the holes, and I rounded the corners. I then used wallpaper seam adhesive to glue the patches in place. I decided to just cover over the old molly bolts. |
Categories
All
Archives
January 2024
|