My love of music should come as no surprise to anyone by this point. I spent three months this year on a series specifically about music, and I have another upcoming post devoted to that topic. The number of songs I have on my hard drive totals well over 10000. This year, I finally broke down and bought an iPod. Unfortunately, the only iPod with the capability of storing my vast music library is the recently discontinued iPod Classic. It cost me an arm and a leg, but I purchased a 160 GB iPod Classic in October.
I never felt that I was lacking before I had an iPod, but I must admit that having one certainly enhanced my workout experience. The ability to handpick my workout music led to greater quality in my workouts and much faster runs. I was particularly careful with my iPod because I knew how much I spent on it and that a replacement would not be readily available.
One of life’s sad realities is that no matter how careful you are with anything, slipups are virtually inevitable. One day shortly after Thanksgiving, I set my iPod down after a workout. For some reason I set it face down on top of an envelope. I don’t know where my mind was at that moment, but it happened.
When I grabbed the iPod to listen to it, I came to the realization that my earbuds were adhered to the screen of the device. When I went to pull the earbuds, it made a very loud (and seemingly very deep) scratch down the center of my screen. I was devastated! I had worked so hard to keep something nice, and within the span of a few seconds, I had ruined it all.
I didn’t touch my iPod for a few days after that. Even though I knew the device still worked, I couldn’t bear to look at what I had done. I messed it up, and I couldn’t fix it. Or so I had thought…
After a few days, the scratch had dried up and sort of crusted up. I thought this was a result of settling because the scratch was no longer fresh. It stayed in this state for a couple weeks before getting worse. Instead of the scratch only covering a small portion of the screen, it began to expand!
Then something interesting happened. My iPod fell out of my pocket at the gym and landed face down. I knew I couldn’t possibly make the screen worse than it already was, so I thought little of it when I picked it up. Instinctively, I wiped off the screen with my shirt to remove the dust from the floor of the gym. When I did that, I noticed that the scratch got a little smaller. I thought it had to be some optical illusion or that my good mood was clouding my judgment, so I thought little of it until I got home.
When I got home, I came to a startling realization. The scratch was never a scratch. The adhesive part of the enveloped dried and coagulated on my iPod. All it was that happened was that some sticky stuff got on my screen and dried up, leaving what I thought to be an ugly scar. If I had taken a closer look at it, I would’ve known right away that it was something that was easily fixable. I wiped off my screen, and now it looks exactly as it did the day I bought it.
That turn of events got me thinking about life in general. Sometimes we look at situations and see that they are not exactly what we would like for them to be at that moment, so we discard that situation thinking that it is already helpless. I am certainly guilty of panicking at the first sign of trouble when it comes to people I care about. I say things that I have absolutely no right to say. I look at some situations and instead of being patient I feel helpless and make things worse. I then get discouraged and want to give up because I did something stupid.
But we have to remember that life takes effort to get from where we are to where we want to be. Sometimes we have to face the things we don’t like. Yes, sometimes things will be broken, and all we can do is move on. But sometimes things are easily fixed. They may take time (and even a little luck) to get to where you want them to be, but it is possible! This past week was living proof of that for me. Sometimes they’re not even broken at all. Don’t give up.
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