I recently took a trip to both hang out and help a friend of mine.  One project he needed help with was organizing his garage. 

This is a task I am uniquely qualified for-every house I’ve moved into with a garage, the garage has always been organized and set up before the rest of the house.  Thus, when I heard he needed help with his garage, my mind clicked on and I was ready to go. 

As we were working on several other projects around the house and property, I realized that the cordless tools were scattered about, and I wanted to get them organized.  I decided I would take some time and build a stand for them, thinking to myself, ‘hey, this will help out a lot!’

I spent some time looking around for the materials and tools to make this happen, and my ADHD/OCD kicked in full blast. I was a man on a mission.  Then, as I was searching for equipment, I saw a hand crank winch on the floor with the cable pulled out and just lying in a mess on the floor.  I stopped.  I looked at it and started thinking about that cable.  I had almost tripped over it a couple of times, and decided that I would fix that cable.  I clamped the winch to a bench and began spooling the cable in by hand.  It was a painstakingly slow process, and by the time I was done, about 20-30 minutes had passed.

As the time passed while I was spooling the cable, I started looking around the garage.  I realized quickly that my initial plan was nothing more than a tiny drop of water in a 5 gallon bucket…sure, it would have made it nicer to find the tools, but there was so much more to do, and in the grand scheme of things, that was a waste of time. 

Some would have argued that the action of me spending a half hour spooling a winch cable back onto a spool by the hand crank was a waste of time; and I could envision the interaction should my friend walk in on me doing it.  “Hey man, don’t worry about that.  We got other things to do, and that can wait till later.”

He would have been right too.  And wrong.  It could wait. There were other things to do.  On the other hand, it had been sitting there unspooled for some amount of time, because my friend hadn’t had the time to spool it himself due to the sheer volume of projects he has going on.  I had the time currently, and could get that one thing fixed for him. 

While I was spooling it, it gave me the chance to step out of my 3 ft world, into the 3000 ft view, and take the entire garage into perspective.  I was able to identify what would make the biggest gain for the least amount of work, and when my friend came out, I ran the plan by him.  It was received well, and we took action on it the next day.  We made a mess, but in the end he was able to gain most of a garage bay back, to where he was able to actually park his truck inside the garage, and a lot of the mess was reorganized at least temporarily off the floor and back into an accessible home on shelving.

It made me think that his garage is a metaphor for our lives.  Often times we try to fix one thing in our life, and get focused on it. At all other costs, we are determined to fix a small thing at the expense of the greater good.  Then, when we take the time out to focus and look at what we have going on, we end up having to make a huge mess of ourselves in order begin to make large gains.  Even though some of those gains may be temporary, they eventually work towards completion of our goals. 

Seth is a former Marine Staff Sergeant who was medically separated after 14 years. Often referred to as “Eeyore” due to his naturally dour expression, monotone voice and often gloomy sounding outlook on things. He writes when he has time, and breaks the stereotypes as a Korean born Asian-American who dips, drives diesel trucks, hunts, and used to ride bulls in his younger and skinnier days.