In Defense of the Mess

I lugged my broken laptop to the electronics store yesterday, hoping for an easy fix. The man behind the counter plugged it in, pressed the power button, and, within a matter of seconds said very solemnly, "It's the motherboard."

This sounded very serious. It also sounded very basic, as if it was something I should know about, so I did the only thing that seemed logical at the time: I pretended to know.

"Oh no, not tha-at..."

He was not amused. "Do you have an external hard drive?"

I figured that if I couldn't remember what an external hard drive was, I probably did not have it. So I confidently said that I did not.

"Here," he said, plunking down one of those incomprehensibly-difficult-to-open electronic packages on the counter. "I'll transfer the data onto an external hard drive." I nodded.

"Do you want to recycle your computer?"

Oh. So that's what a broken motherboard means. I was frustrated. Now I would have to buy a new computer -- and I thought momentarily of the past five years that that computer had seen of my life. What next?

Around the same time, my mom told me her adventures of taking the grandchildren bowling. Because both of my nieces became sick in the car, they didn't make it to the bowling center and didn't get to spend the day as planned. She spent the next day cleaning up the car, cleaning up the house, and helping take care of them.

As I grow older, I can't help but notice how easily these little things come to my mom -- one setback here, one fix there, one step at a time. "Kids throw up," I've heard her say matter-of-factly and with a laugh. "That's just what they do."

These are the messy parts of life: messy cars, messy houses, broken computers, broken motherboards. They feel like interruptions, but sooner or later, you realize that these messy interruptions make up a good deal of life, and the way you handle them determines a lot about your character and your future.

These are the messy parts of life, maybe the "Ordinary Time" that we hurry through, embarrassed at the pettiness of these setbacks.

But they make a lot more sense when you realize that  life is less about reaching a specific destination (not to disparage destinations, of course) and more about loving: it's more about treating the person behind the counter delivering the bad news or the child in the backseat throwing up as more than an interruption.

Then love becomes action, interrupting our very messy, ordinary time and giving it meaning and hope and plenty of reasons to laugh at ourselves.