A couple of days ago I put a load of clothes to wash at high temperature. Towels and sheets, all nice and clean to dry.
Today I woke up and my housemate had put another machine to wash. Cardigans and trousers, all nice and clean too. Wonderful! Until we went to put the machine to rinse and noticed that we had washed all these at high temperature too. We hadn’t put the button back to normal temperature either. And it was not long before our imaginations were filled with images of shrunken clothes & Co(laterals).
What would have been your reaction?
But, a small exercise: imagine yourself a week ago. You are taken to the hospital. Doctors run tests on you and they end up finding you have a terminal disease. You have a couple of years left - they say. You are taken aback and feel like the rug of life is being pulled off your feet so suddenly. What would be your first thoughts after the news?
You end up going home, put down the keys, say hello and go put the clothes to rinse. But you notice, just the same situation with the too-high-temperature-for-the-clothes-washing happened. Would your reaction to the event have changed? Why or why not?
Does the perspective of some things being infinitely more important than (potentially damaged) clothes change our reactions? Things like love, and relationships. Things that transcend time, things we want to invest on when we realize there is not much time left. Everything else should be an instrument to serve that. It is true we do not want to be wrecking everything we put our hands into. (But how many times people are avoiding put their hands into things with the fear of wrecking things? A topic for another post.)
What if our daily lives could start being shaped by the things that really matter right now — like loving other people, and creating stories worth telling. What if, for example, we didn’t have to wait for a terrible news to come to realize that we don’t want to get upset so often?
We can. Time is ticking. What are you going to do with it?
I choose to laugh at our laundry today. And in the end, nothing too bad happened to them. Our friendship has another story to tell and we will also remember better to put the temperature right next times.
