Gratitude. by A. Paul Miller

While visiting a friend in the hospital the other day who was recovering from a stroke, he mentioned how much we can take our health for granted.

I suddenly found myself telling him about this observation that I first noticed several years ago:

How many things do we all have in our lives like friends, family, health and shelter that we take for granted and never appreciate that they are there?

Expensive Shirts and Pilling

A bit of background first: many years ago when I used to be an Electronic Engineer working in Silicon valley, I would wear nice shirts to work.

So that meant paying a bit more than usual for them, especially since most of them came from a specialty shop in England.

I had one particular shirt from Munich which had very small pilling on it so the label said to iron inside out.

In those days I would take my shirts to the cleaners and they would come back nicely cleaned and ironed.

I had expected the cleaners to spot the pilling and treat this shirt differently, after all, I spotted it right away.

As you are probably guessing by now, it came back with the pilling completely crushed!

After that I decided to iron my own clothes. Since this was a job that I was going to “enjoy immensely”, it required a DVD and several beers to drink while executing the process to help alleviate the boredom.

The wardrobe was empty, and I had run out of clothes; they had all been used and washed over the last few weeks, and the very large pile of ironing was now a serious obstacle to finding somewhere to sit on my 4 person couch.

With a DVD selected and some beers lined up, all I needed was the iron and ironing board.

So into the small kitchen I went looking for the ironing board.

Nothing there.

Well maybe it’s in the pantry.

No, nothing there.

Well, it’s not in the sitting room, as I would never leave it out for visitors to see.

What about the downstairs cloakroom?

No, not there.

I would never have put it in the garage, but I had better check just in case; nope, not there.

Oh, for goodness sake, I thought to myself.

I live in a small 1300 SqFt town home how difficult can it be to hide an ironing board from yourself!!

In the famous words of Sherlock Homes: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

So I headed upstairs to continue my quest.

In and out of all the wardrobes in all 3 bedrooms I looked.

Yes, I was at this point taking the ‘improbable’ part very seriously! Also nothing in either of the two upstairs bathrooms. At this point the only improbable thing left was that I had poltergeists and they had moved it.

Back down stairs I went.

Slow Down and Observe

Okay, Paul. Slow down.

Start at the beginning and go through the whole house again slowly.

So back into the Kitchen I went. I glanced at my watch. It had been 20 minutes since I first started my search. I was starting to get very grumpy.

Open a beer and pause a moment I thought.

As I went back into the kitchen to get the beer, there was the board, leaning against the kitchen wall!! I had put it there many many weeks ago and had walked passed it so many times that it had ceased to be separate from the wall.

For all intents and purposes it had become a part of the wall. In that moment of realizing why I had not seen it, I suddenly wondered how many things I have in my life that are always in front of me, but never see any more.

Just how many ironing boards do we have in our lives?

Right now stop and think for a moment, name an ironing board in your life.

Something that you see in your life so much that you take it for granted.