Adjusting the Sails
    By Chris Dwyer
     
    I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.
    -Jimmy Dean
    I
    may not always be the proverbial king of my castle, but I am certainly
    the king of my kitchen. Even so, when the Lady of the Castle (my lovely
    wife) asks me to do the dishes, I’m totally cool with that. If I’m in
    the act of doing them, as I often am, and she has a helpful hint,
    that’s fine, too. But heaven forbid, if she tells me to do the dishes
    and THEN tells me how to do them, I go completely berserk. Dishes almost
    get tossed against the wall and the wife. This is because telling me
    what to do plus telling me how to do it somehow hacks into my
    psychology’s circuitry and unleashes my hellspawn-husband virus. I’m sorry– it’s terrible. I hate it. But I don’t hate myself, because it’s just the way God made me.
    I’m not shifting blame here. In fact, I take full responsibility for having some responsibility. 
    My
    wife and I have been working on doing a better job seeing things at a
    BIG-picture level. Before we blame each other, or other people, we try
    to see if there is a better way to design “the system”. The larger
    system so often implicitly coerces people into doing crazy things they
    don’t want to do. And systems usually obey very predictable behavior. So
    really, what I’ve decided to do is take full responsibility for not being in harmony with the system around me. I can either work to change myself, or I can work to change the system, or both. This
    strategy has helped save us (me) from countless Catherine Kieu Becker
    (the woman who cut off her husband’s penis and threw it in the garbage
    disposal). 
    I
    used to do infrared inspections for a large manufacturing facility
    called Bicycle Playing Cards. Un-scheduled equipment breakdowns are
    every plant manager’s worst nightmare, so the accountants and engineers
    are big proponents of preventative maintenance strategies like infrared.
    My mandate was to keep the motors alive or else know exactly when they
    would die. 
    Of
    the thousands of motors that I inspected in the plant, there was one
    tiny motor that was far and away more important than every other motor.
    It was the lynchpin of the whole factory. If it failed, the whole plant
    shut down. It was the vacuum motor! Without the vacuum motor, all the
    junk accumulated in the factory and effed-up the whole process. Las
    Vegas herself depended on that vacuum motor.
    Our kitchen has a
    figurative vacuum motor– the lynchpin of the system that could unfasten
    bliss at any moment. Working the system backwards, we figured out that
    my dishes only needed her special cleaning advice because I didn’t soak
    them first. But I didn’t soak mine first because the sink was full of
    her dishes because the dishwasher wasn’t emptied. But I couldn’t empty
    the dishwasher because there were too many cycling water bottles drying
    out on the limited countertop real estate. Water bottles were the
    lynchpin! 
    What
    we needed, therefore, was a better drying mechanism and storage system
    for our water bottles. But that would require a larger system change
    upstream. Next,
    Susie and I sat down at the drawing board to see if we could map out a
    better system for our household. Here is the plan we came up within
    reverse order.
    GOAL = Have more free time and stay married
    Step 6) Stop buying (or accepting) junk into our house
    Step 5) Deeply, quickly, and even impulsively get rid of the junk we already have
    Step 4) Get rid of our TV from TV cabinet 
    Step 3) Retrofit TV cabinet into a “recreation locker”
    Step 2) Find home for water bottles
    Step 1) Empty dishwasher in the morning and load/run it at night
    All the crap that’s normally spews across the floor after a workout has a proper home now
    Water bottle clutter almost ruined our marriage until they found a home

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