Little things

We all make adjustments to our surroundings, sometimes when we should adjust the surroundings.

One of our consultants, he of the too many books, is now in the throes of moving to a new apartment.  The process has reminded him of the many little things he habitually does just because of idiosyncrasies in his present place.  He is careful of placing round things on his table, because the floors are not level and they might roll off.  His washer-dryer unit is good at the former, useless at the latter, so his bathroom is festooned with drying racks and he is restricted in the number of loads he can do within one drying-time.  A smoke alarm is positioned just above the stove in the kitchen, so he has to disable it if he does any frying or broiling.  There are many others he could name, and we could all join in with our own examples, if we thought hard.  These are unavoidable, given the circumstances.

Then there are the adjustments we make because we’re busy and don’t have time right now to fix something permanently.  One of us had an old, rickety bedframe, and often he had to get up in the middle of the night to adjust the slats so they wouldn’t work free and fall down.  He finally got a new bed after much too long a time adjusting.  We’re sorry to say that much of the horizontal space in our working-places is covered with piles, because we haven’t gotten around to stowing books and papers in a proper, permanent way.  These sorts of adjustments tend to go on too long because they’re only brought to our attention when we don’t have time to fix them, and we don’t think about them when we do have the time.  It’s the classic case of not being able to fix the leaky roof during a rainstorm, and the roof doesn’t leak when the rain stops.

There are people who are organized about these adjustments.  They maintain a proper list of jobs about the house that need to be attended to when there’s time and opportunity.  Some of our friends found, when they retired, that they now had the time and opportunity, and worked harder now than when they were employed full-time.  (Others found that, without the discipline of going to work regularly and having to fit tasks into the restricted free time, even normal jobs didn’t get attended to.  That’s different problem.)

Nowadays many of the tasks are not of the physical things-around-home variety, but online.  Just logging into accounts we don’t use often, to keep things updated, should be done much more than we get around to.  We won’t even talk about keeping all the files on one’s computer properly organized.

One can do too much fixing of things, though we suspect it’s uncommon; like stopping the cooking of dinner until the lights and appliances in the kitchen are all exactly in place and working as intended.  Much more likely is continuing to adjust day by day when a little time one morning would fix things permanently.  The questions is: how much should you adjust to your surroundings, and how much should you adjust your surroundings to you?