When You Worry You Make It Double

for several days now, we've had repairmen working at our home.  we discovered that an area around our garage doors had been attacked by termites, so we've been having the damaged wood removed, the area treated for termites, and new wood put back.  inside the house, we've been having some improvements made that we've been wanting to do since buying our home.  the men who have been doing the work on both jobs have been very agreeable, and they've done fine work, so we're quite pleased.  the inside work has been completed, and the work on the garage is almost finished.

despite the professionalism of the men we employed and their care to make certain that we are pleased with their work, it has been incredibly stressful for my wife and i.  whenever anything like this is going on, it seems as if the whole house is turned topsy-turvy, and to have both the garage and the house in disorder at the same time was almost more than we could handle.  we're both cleanliness and order freaks, and we were on edge the whole time the work was being done.  we spent the entire day after the work in the house was completed putting things back in order and cleaning every room in the house.  now that is done, we feel at ease once more.  in a few days, i'll be able to get the garage back in order and do some cleaning up out there, so all will be just as we want it to be, at least until the next time we need to have some home repairs or improvements done.

as i sit and think about how stressed we were, i wonder what it is that puts us on edge about a situation like this.  those doing the work couldn't have been more pleasant or more concerned with doing work that was just what we wanted.  the repairs and improvements were done well and left our home in much better shape than before.  i suppose that we were concerned that some aspect of the work might be subpar, leading to a potential confrontation with one of the workers, that there might be some dispute about the cost of the completed work, or that some unforeseen difficulties might arise that would make the work more difficult and more costly.  none of those things happened, so our stress and worry were completely unnecessary.  the root cause of our anxiety was that the orderliness of our home was disturbed for a protracted length of time.  as always, we were resistant to changes that disturbed the flow of our lives.  that, in addition to the changes mandated by the virus outbreak and our country's many mistakes in dealing with it, made us miserable.  i wonder, now that the home repairs are done for the time being, how we could better have dealt with the disturbances to our daily routine.

may we learn to accept that change is a part of life, that everything cannot always be just as we want it to be.  may we look to the results that beneficial changes bring, rather than the disruptions that are passing and transitory.  may we be grateful for those who are the agents of change that make our lives better.  may we accept that we are humans who feel stress and worry instead of feeling guilty for having those very human traits.  shalom.