Recently a neighbor of mine asked the apartment manager about buying my car. His name was Angel, and he was a mechanic. I had been meaning to sell the car for quite some time, so this inquiry was a godsend. The manager, Samara, acted as translator for our meeting.
We met in the garage to talk shop and take a look at the item in question: black Jetta, almost twenty years old, stick shift with faux-leather seats. Within minutes we had her running, with Angel checking mileage and the oil level. He asked questions about her history, and I gave passing attempts at Spanish, much to the enjoyment of the others. And the meeting ended amiably, with Angel expressing interest and promising a decision by week’s end.
I feel I handled myself well, but I came away from the encounter shaking. Part of the reason was likely low energy on my part; I hadn’t eaten well that day, just eggs and coffee. But part of this strange angst felt social, as if I hadn’t fulfilled an obligation that may have been expected of me. I hadn’t maintained my car in months, and in fact the registration had been expired since April of last year, fully fourteen months ago. By that point I had started ride-sharing to work if memory serves, so there were no immediate ramifications to postponing a trip to the DMV. And by the time I did get around it, my smog check was out of date. By this time my battery was also dead, so I left the car in my apartment parking space and attempted to forget about it.
I realized viscerally how much this had bothered me, leaving problems like this on the backburner. I hadn’t forgotten about the car this past year. Occasionally I would get little pangs of panic, worry about when I should handle the ‘car situation’. It had become a situation, another thing to ignore in my life. I would wile away my time on YouTube, or drink all night with my roommate, and pretend that something so deferrable would also be unimportant.
But that’s not how it goes. These panic pangs, these minor heart attacks are not and never have been ‘fine’. These problems are both easy to solve for and bear avoidable penalties, like failing to unsubscribe from a newspaper you never read. This combination made my car situation and others like it a high-value problem, something well worth completing.
So why didn’t I do it? Why hadn’t I simply spent the time, cut the situation into tasks and checked them off one by one? For this question I have no rational answer. It seems to me that I treat certain stresses with avoidance, taking my internal sense of obligation and heightening it to a global imperative, and painting the ramifications of neglect as world-ending. Basic paranoia stuff, very Cold War. But then the cool hippie guy in my head turns to the Sergeant of Mutually-Assured-Destruction and vibes, “Dude, why don’t you relax? If it’s a big deal it’ll be a big deal later. Let’s just be cool.” Then they go smoke some weed or something.
Turns out, this isn’t a great way to live. Painting every sidestepped task as catastrophic doesn’t help me finish things. And the remedial “chill out” is a great relief here, but it wouldn’t be necessary if my Sergeant wasn’t screaming in the first place. This is all avoidable if I can learn to weigh my daily tasks more rationally. But in the end all I really had to do, was go and fix the stupid car. Come on.
Moral of the story is, don’t let your panic pangs be part of your day. Learn to take care of the things that bother you, because the weight of angst and unhappiness will never be worth their postponement.
--Jingleheimer-- 