I’ve Found the Problem, and it’s Me

Jeff was one of the best tech guys I’ve ever known, and he was also the most diplomatic. More than once, after he had diagnosed and solved a computer problem for me, I would ask him what the glitch was. With a gentle smile, he would answer quietly, “It was located between the chair and the keyboard”.

All this, of course, after I had complained long and hard about the keyboard and the chair, as well as the network card, the ISP, Microsoft, Dell, and the memory chips. And a whole lot more. That I might have been the problem hadn’t occurred to me.

We’re all a bit like that, aren’t we? Sure, we have our problems, but they’re not our fault, right? They’re all caused by other people and external circumstances. Evil forces beyond our control.

To be sure, there are many trials and tribulations which are external. A meteorite crashing through the roof onto the dinner table is not something that you can do much about, much less for which you can prepare yourself. Life can sideswipe us, no doubt.

I don’t know about you, but I do know about me, and I suspect we’re not all that different. When I step on a rake, there’s a 90% chance I’m the guy who left it in the grass. When I have to stay up all night cramming for a deadline, I’m the guy who lallygagged for months, blissfully ignoring the red circle on my calendar. If I haven’t saved up enough to replace my old beater car, it’s because I frittered away all that money on necessities like life-sized Santa Claus statues.

More importantly, when I need friends and support, they may not be there for me because I was not there for them. I had more important stuff to do like surfing trivia shows. Except the trivia shows won’t come around to comfort me in my hour of need.

Whether you believe in the Christian doctrine of “ye shall reap whatsoever ye sow” or you’re into karma, it’s pretty well the same thing. We don’t always get what we deserve, and we don’t always deserve what we get, but nine times out of ten, we do. There is a direct correlation between what we put in, and what we get out.

The funny thing is that almost all of us intrinsically understand that if you want to get good things out of the slot machine of life, you have to keep shoving coins into the slot. We generally only get back if we’ve put in.

Life is mostly fairly straightforward.