Where does the time go?
I was talking to some coworkers this afternoon about getting my hot water heater replaced today, and how it’d been leaking over a year and it was time. Almost as soon as the words left my lips, I knew that it’d been more than a year. It’s probably been leaking over 2 years now. How could I know? Because I talked to A about it when I first noticed it leaking. He was the one that said as long as it can’t hurt anything if it leaks or gushes (it’s in the garage), and we’re still getting hot water out of it, then we could leave it until we no longer had hot water. And I haven’t talked with A about anything for almost 21 months now. I have to admit, every time I saw that damned leaky hot water heater, I thought of him. (I’m sure he’d be thrilled by the association.)
I didn’t bother to issue a verbal correction on the leakage timeline. Nobody would care, and it wasn’t germane to the story. But it brought me up short, momentarily. It’s funny, how many landmines lie hidden in the most mundane stuff. I wonder…I wonder how many such landmines explode in every conversation between, say, 3 people. Given that we all have our pasts, our sore spots, our wounds that never quite close, and that a hot water heater leak could evoke such a strong emotion for me, could my comment on the spring weather or someone else’s mention of out-of-season watermelon give someone else the same kind of pause? How many invisible explosions do we unknowingly set off every day in the hearts of people we talk to? And yet, we probably will never know if we do. We probably will never know what wound we just innocently dumped salt into; most of us do such an excellent job of hiding it, or the worst of it, at least. If we could only remember that everyone we meet probably has at least as many soul wounds as we do, how gentle we would be with each other.