One morning I went out to the garage and pressed the garage door opener on the wall as I was readying myself to depart to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment or to drive to Argentina, well probably not the last one. But the garage door did not open? The spring that lifts the door had apparently broken. No biggie, they sell stuff like that at Home Depot, maybe $50 and a bit of YouTube video searching, possibly a call to a company to install it and I should be able to get back to normal. I manually lift the door and head off to Patagonia.
But I find that Home Depot does not carry a spring like mine, mine is significantly longer (don’t say it). Upon further investigative work I learn that these types of springs are special, and really should never have been used in the first place. They are dangerous. They were made to be able to lift the scissor-type one-piece garage door like we have (an outdated technology) with modern tools (the ubiquitous garage door opener). Simplistically, when they eventually break you have three options, attempt to find one that someone is getting rid of (like I may do with my other still functioning garage door spring on the other door), hire a company to build you a custom spring at like $800 a pop and then try to find a garage door company that will install this knowing the potential liability, or replace the door for like $1500. But really the last option is not that viable as that would result in two different (dumb looking) garage doors. So really the third option is to replace both garage doors and of course one of the garage door openers since it is old and wimpy looking….so we end up at $2,500 to replace the spring.
But, and this is a big but, thankfully no one got hurt. Those springs have tons of force behind them, literally. And after it is all over I should have a nicer looking house, a better functioning set of doors, a warmer garage and thus house (lower energy bills), and the big one, a safer door operation for a couple different reasons. Heck, I might be able to sell the house someday for more than $2,500 more than I could otherwise thereby essentially getting paid to replace those weird old dangerous doors.
I, of course, could see it this way when I first discovered the problem and definitely not when I learned that it will not be an easy quick cheap fix. It is so hard to change who we are, who we have been. I needed to feel like a victim. How unfair the universe is to have the damn thing break just a few years before we plan to sell the house. I completely ignore that this would imply that likely the subsequent owner of this house would have to experience this instead of me. How is that compassionate or fair? Who am I?
But the story does not end there. Still clinging onto victimhood or injustice or a need to remind myself that I am a failure or in danger or deploying some other outdated coping state I held on to the spring. I kept it in the garage, for what I really do not know. So that I could show it to people and be able to complain about how unfair it is. Fair doesn’t exist; I know this. Similarly, mercifully unfair is also an illusion.
Today, writing this, photographing the spring, sharing it with the world is a final-ish step in my journey with the spring. I do not say final since nothing is final (not even death 😊). More practically, I say final-ish because I know myself. I know my blind-spots and challenges. I know that I will still think about it again, if only fleetingly. Final is a process, a path not a destination. Today I am more final with the spring than I was yesterday. Soon I will load it into my car to be taken up to our cabin (where we can recycle metal easily in the complex there). Is it fair that we have a cabin and most do not, or even, many have no home at all?
I will not only give the spring away, but allow it to maybe become a piece of rebar for a shiny new skyscraper or even possibly a new, safer, more modern spring for someone else’s modern garage door. Or maybe even a little bit of it will end up in hundreds of buildings and cars and tools. What a long strange journey for that speck of recycled star that graciously passed through my life to teach me lessons that I need to learn again and again. Thank you spring.
