Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

 Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was lecturing to my class the other day, and I made the statement, “Everything is easier the second time you do it.”  Almost by the time it was out of my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true.  But it still carries a useful truth. Let me explain this contradiction.

We’ve all faced things we dreaded.  I hate the word dread, but there it is.  Dread is an unprofitable emotion.  It takes something that is unpleasant and spreads that unpleasantness over time without lessening its intensity.  There are, nevertheless, things we dread, but so often once we do them they are not quite so back.  We can become more skilled at them and make them less onerous. We discover they were entirely different than what we expected.

So in that sense many, many things can be easier the second time you do them.

But in class I had flash through my mind something that had happened many years ago.  It had come a winter storm. There was four inch of snow on the ground, and it was 20 degrees outside.  The plumbing for our kitchen sink comes up parallel to an outside wall.  You guessed it: It froze and burst.  

At that time I had no inside cut off, so I ran out to cut it off at the meter. I had to get a shovel to pry off the lid to the meter well and I had with me a crescent wrench to turn off the valve.  When the lid came off, I discovered why they call it a meter well: It was filled with water well above the valve.

I plunged my arm into the water up to the elbow to turn it off.  I was having trouble getting it done the first time, so I removed my wrench from the water, readjusted it, and went in again.  

It was more difficult to do the second time.

Knowledge is one piece of understanding this.  On one hand, learning how to do something makes the mechanics of doing it easier. On the other hand, knowing how painful something is makes it more difficult to repeat.

What came out of that experience was I spent $7 to buy a T-Wrench that you can use so you don’t have to plunge your arm into the water.  They cost $21 now, so you can see this was all some time ago.  I wrote about this experience at the time, so the more dedicated among you might remember it.  

Recently, I wonder that in addition to knowledge, there might be something else involved: Courage.  In my case, the baby-courage of sticking my arm into the freezing water to get that valve turned off.  The grownup courage it takes for a woman to have a child, and even a second one.

I talked about dread earlier.  I do consider it unprofitable at best and destructive at worst, but dread is often overcome by courage. Courage overcoming dread can lead us to go through unpleasant things and master them.  At the very least, we may be able to find ways to cope--our own personal T-wrenches.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )