Hell is cooler than we are now. A heat wave has come, and people are heated emotionally as well. Makes me think of how impatient people become when extreme conditions cause chaos in our lives, and I feel compelled to provide the following reality check.
We humans tend to habitually ignore the little things until they become big things. We don’t go to the dentist until our teeth hurt, or we ignore the check engine light on our dashboards until the car dies in the middle of the state ludicrous speed highway on Saturday night.
When this happens, instead of realizing the error of our ways and acting contrite, many people lash out and blame everybody and everything else. If it didn’t require actually taking a day off from work (which we love to do beyond everything else), to get in our car (when it’s running) and, gosh gee, drive all the way to the dentist’s office twice a year, and then sit down in a chair and have our teeth x-rayed and cleaned, our teeth would never have a problem, right?
Have you ever noticed that any car trip you don’t like, regardless of the mileage required, becomes an “all the way” trip of inconvenience? If the dentist has an office yards away from your favorite bar, it’s still an “all the way” trip.
When your car goes months without scheduled maintenance, which requires a trip all the way to a service facility and an hour or two of your time in a waiting room (which you spend gazing at your cell phone on social media), it has the gaul to break down when the heat climbs and it refuses to squeeze an extra drop of fluid from the tank you allowed to empty.
So that requires driving all the way to that very service facility you ignored for months, only now the wait will take several hours, and the bill will be a bit more of a strain for the wallet you just emptied at the bar next door to the dentist you haven’t been to.
We Americans are well known for not taking time off to take care of ourselves, much less our stuff. We would rather grouse or pass off problems than get to the bottom of them. It’s all a part of our lackadaisical attitude about life as a whole. It’s killing us.
I propose we take two months with not much going on in them–April and August–and make them Care Months. Get yourself looked at in April, and get your car looked at in August. That way you have paid attention to both at least once this year. Once you do yourself and your car, take another day in April or August for the family’s health, or the air conditioning.
Don’t wait for these things (or yourself) to break down. By then, especially in weather conditions like these, you won’t like what happens when you join the throng calling for help. There are only so many tow trucks to get your car to a service center, and once they’re all out for everybody ahead of you, you will have to wait. And when the dentist has a room full of people with tooth problems, you will be enduring some pain for awhile before you are seen in that comfy chair where the joys of painkillers await.
A little prevention may not end the heat, but it might curb some of the grumpiness that goes with it, because when your teeth are in good shape and your car runs, you smile.
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