Lately I’ve been giving a fair bit of thought to what are the impediments to getting any given thing done or problem solved. Like with the mold in our bathroom, I try to figure out: what is in the way? Is it something mental or physical? How can I shift that impediment or get around it? Can I figure out a different way to meet the same need? What is the core need in the situation anyhow? Can I completely bypass the impediment by going a different route to get to where I want to go?
One of the problems I’ve been trying to solve for years is exercise. I won’t go on about that again now, but recently one of the impediments I identified is that I want to exercise first thing in the morning (before I get involved in any of the many other things I’d rather do), but I also want to get online first thing in the morning. These two activities were clearly in conflict with each other.
So a solution was asking Andy, marvelously awesome sweetie that he is, to build me a laptop stand for the elliptical machine. He built it, and it was great. I also fixed the wireless network in the house (4 calls to Belkin + a couple more to my cable provider), and Andy loaned me an old boat anchor laptop. I deleted a zillion files and applications from it, bought it a new battery and finally got so it would function reasonably well. It was entertaining enough that I could exercise and barely even notice I’d been doing it for an hour. I think I went for like a week of exercising almost every day.
I soon got frustrated, though, with the way it took several minutes just to scroll down a page, so I got a newer faster laptop. The new laptop is lighter, too, so suddenly the marvelous stand was a bit too wobbly. Not being under a boat anchor anymore and all.
Andy and I had a few head-scratching sessions and were in the process of trying to realize a very elaborate and hard-to-execute stabilizing solution that Clearly Was Not Going To Work. The details of why are hard to condense into a few words, but let’s just say that strange protruding bits of metal were involved.
What was really cool was that in seeing how hard it would be to solve the stability problem the way we thought could work if it weren’t for those darned metal bits, Andy came up with a solution that was so genius, so simple, and it was those very same metal bits that made Andy’s solution work. The new improved laptop stand can’t wiggle at all without moving the entire machine, it’s that sturdy.
I think I’ll be looking at impediments in a new light from now on, seeing if more of them hold the keys to their own solutions. Maybe I will even ponder those issues while I noodle around on the internet and ride the elliptical at the same time.
