It was obvious that my friend George was allergic to work. Giraffes could have hidden in the grass of his front yard. Outside the back door was a tall pile of garbage bags, because he was too lazy to take the trash fifty feet to the street, where the city would happily have removed it. You couldn't walk in George's house, because he left everything where he had used it or thrown it. The floor was covered with objects and dirt, to the point that it was no longer possible to see whether the surface was carpet, wood, or whatever. To get from one spot to another, you had to perform a kind of shuffle, pushing objects out of your way as you moved forward.
It sounds disgusting. Because it was. One day I visited him while it was raining, and soon I heard repetitive, metallic, plinking sounds, irregularly spaced and increasing in frequency. I asked George about it, and he said, "I need more pots." George was not a chatty or informative man.
I stood and looked around to discover that the sound resulted from rain leaking through holes in his roof and dropping into pots and other metal containers scattered throughout the house. Ironically, George had the funds to repair his roof, but he said he didn't wanted any of those "damn people poking around" in his house if they had to repair structural damage inside. His solution? More pots to catch the water as it seeped into the house in more locations.
George brings a smile to my face every time I think of him. It's so obviously ludicrous that he would choose "more pots" as a temporary and messy solution to a problem that could be permanently solved with a phone call to a roofing company. And yet most of us approach the difficulties in our life in just such a ridiculous way.
We fuss endlessly about issues with spouses, parents, children, work, and more. We appear to solve problems, but mostly we're just putting out "more pots." We don't fix the roof.
Under the shelter of Real Love, we don't need pots. We're freed from crisis management and can attend instead to becoming more happy and productive.
