It's Better to Learn It Now

Recently, I learned a lesson about keeping things perfect.

I received a gift but I didn't want to use it yet, lest my hands smudge it and despoil it.  So I purchased a cheap cover for it online.  And while I waited, I didn't use my gift because I figured the cover would come soon enough.

Well, I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.  And the cover still didn't come.  And boy, did I get angry.  I wanted to complain and write bad reviews.  Now mind you, this was still in the established window for delivery, but since they had said it shipped already, I couldn't see why it hadn't already arrived.  And so I was -- to put it mildly -- annoyed.

But a few days into this, more rational thought came to me and I realized:  It was my fault for being annoyed.  Not because I had ordered it online, nor because I wasn't patient, but because I had imposed on myself a rule that I couldn't touch my gift until this cover arrived to protect it, to keep it perfect forever more.

And that's when I realized, perhaps the universe was trying to send me a message.  Perhaps it was trying to teach me something about keeping things perfect; that being, you can't keep things perfect.  Thing get messed up, and dirty, and leave tracings of your touch.  But so what if it does?  So what if it's not perfectly clean?  As long as it works and you have fun with it, that's what matters.

And so, finally, with this thought and after another day passed without receiving my cover, I opened my gift, and I (*gasp) touched it, and I got smudges on it, and I used it.  And I also had fun with it.  And it occurred to me then that it wasn't the worse for wear because I touched it.  Actually, it seemed more mine, more personal, because I did.

A few days later, my cover finally arrived.  And I put it on.  And it occurred to me that it had looked a tad bit better without the cover.  And then I was glad to have had that time where I had touched my gift as it was, bare and naked.  It sounds silly, but there it was.  I realized then that touching it unprotected hadn't made it less perfect at all; in fact, it had made it somehow better.


When I first realized this lesson I was learning, I soon thought after, "Why didn't I learn this before?  I should have known this before."  I have thought this thought many times in my life.  It seemed to me that I could never learn anything yet it would have been better if I had learned it earlier.  But then it occurred to me that:  Now is the best time to learn it.

Because we need to learn something new every day.  That's what makes life satisfying and full.  If I had learned everything I needed to learn before this day, then I could certainly make use of my knowledge for ever after, but then also, how less satisfying my days would be if I never again after learned anything of value.  If everything became, like they say, old-hat.  Life would get pretty boring.

But life is not like that.  Life can teach you many many things if you will only listen.  And not only do you become more knowledgeable for it, you also become more satisfied with life for it.

And so now I know better:  You learn something new every day.  You'll just have to get used to that.