Yes, that's a cumbersome title for a post. But it's what I want to say here. I have this amazing super power. I zap electronics with a touch of my hand. Or rather, when I use my electronic equipment, it goes bizonko, consistently, continually, until it dies. Ask anyone who's worked with me or lived with me and they will confirm it. I touch it, and it stops functioning correctly. Let me give you some examples. I've killed every computer that I've ever had, usually within a year. When I go to have them fixed, they are always declared dead, unfixable, beyond help. Then I buy a new one, and inevitably within a month, I have zapped it. I take it back, get a new-new one, and this often repeats several times until we find one that can last a little longer than a month, and we hope will take us through a year or so. This is the case with other electronics as well. We got a new portable DVD player - nope. Had to go back because I made the mistake of being the one to open it and touch it first. We bought a keyboard for a tablet that we'd received as a gift. Again, I made the mistake of being the one to open it, so it didn't work and we had to send it back. The list goes on; printers, phones, dish washers... anything electronic. If I forget and in my excitement rush to be the one to open and turn whatever the new electronic item is, on, it gives up the ghost before we even get it started and it will have to be replaced. If someone else initiates its opening, it will often work for a short while until I...well, as I said, I kill electronics. It's just a matter of time. It's irritating, annoying, sad, problematic, and at some level a bit humorous how consistent and inevitable it really is.
But as with every other challenge in my life, I choose to come at them, to see them, as gifts. So what is the gift in this challenge for me? What is the lesson here to be learned, to be faced?
I've realized there are a few things that this particular "gift" is teaching me. The first is patience. In this instant gratification society, when things, even brand new things that didn't exist a year ago, don't work, we get very upset and want them fixed immediately. We EXPECT things to work constantly and we see the times when they don't as great inconveniences and wastes of our time. But I've been given the gift of having things that tend not to work immediately for me with some consistency. It takes time to send back the products we've bought that aren't working and to wait for replacements. When this happens several times in a row, it can take a LONG time (well, relatively - weeks. In the larger scheme this is still really a very short time) to obtain what I am hoping for. I am trying to accept these delays as exercises in waiting, in remembering that it is a luxury to have things as quickly and easily as we do now, as a chance to step back and breathe. I am striving to see these times as invitations to move a little more slowly and to take the time to take time, to re-learn patience and to find meaning in the waiting, in being still. These are also opportunities to practice "doing without", which brings me to the next lesson.
I am learning to take these times when my electronics aren't working as a break from said electronics, an invitation to not depend on these as much, a chance to return to the basics of talking to people in person, writing by hand, and reading actual paper books. It is good for me, it is good for my family, to have spaces and periods where we can't do all the computer, phone, media stuff that we normally do. And I see these periods of electronic failure as opportunities to let those things go for a short interval.
I am certain there are other gifts in this, too. But for today, I am striving to remember that even difficult situations and challenges are opportunities, invitations, and gifts for growth, learning, and being in a different way. So for today, I am choosing not to see it as a "flaw" that I zap electronics, but as a super-power that is helping my family and myself to grow and learn in a new way.
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