The bug or the windshield

I've often wondered what's worse; being the bug or the windshield. Mary Chapin Carpenter sang about that 20 or so years ago and I've wondered about it from time to time ever since. Neither one is very pleasant. The bug gets smashed and dies which not many of us want but the window gets abused too. So I'm thinking it's not an either-or situation, it's just which is the better of two bad options.

And that happens to all of us; some more than others. I'm going through that right now with my new Mustang. I finally got it in the shop three weeks ago after driving it around damaged for almost two months because the body shops were bogged down with work. But a part that was ordered came in damaged, was returned and the second part was worse than the first. So they had to order it a third time and that put them over a week behind in repairing the car. So now it's not going to be ready until the middle of next week and my insurance for a rental car runs out today. There are no good solutions. I wanted the car to look brand new when I picked it up and I didn't want any out-of-pocket expenses connected with the car's repair and that's not going to happen. So I'm screwed.

Even though that occasionally happens to all of us, most of those things we can tolerate because there's always a worse outcome than the one we received. Hardly anything happens to us that couldn't have been worse. When the deer ran into the side of my car during a rainstorm, it caused almost $10,000 worth of damage. But I didn't lose control of the car, wreck the car, or get hurt or killed. So as bad as it was, it could have been much worse. Failings, disappointments and the occasional heartbreak are just consequences of living life on a planet that doesn't make much sense a lot of the time so we just have to suck it up and try to make the best of a bad situation.

It's fairly simple to do that when we're more or less in charge of the situation. Typically, a little pep talk to ourselves is all we need. We remind ourselves that even though we're in a bad situation, it could be much worse and it's not nearly as bad as the situation many other people find themselves in. So we dust ourselves off and get back in the race.

But that's much more difficult to do when someone else is in charge of what's happening to us instead of us. When you're in a relationship for example that's suddenly ended by the other person without any explanation, you feel all of a sudden like you're not in charge of anything. The person who put a smile on your face and joy in your heart every day is gone and you don't know why. Because you don't know why, there's nothing you can do to fix it. It's the most helpless feeling imaginable. In every other area of our lives, there are things we can do to fix whatever problem we're in or at least make it better. But not when we've given our heart to another person because when we do that, we've turned ourselves over to them and now they're in control instead of us. Because they are, if they lose the feelings they had for us, they can abandon us without explanation and all we can do is mourn our loss.

To do that to somebody is not a very adult act. It's not a very mature act. And it's certainly not a very caring act. In fact, it's a selfish, evil act that should be punished but most of us don't do that either because we know that nothing we do in a vindictive way will win the heart of that person back and will, in fact, push them even farther away from us than they already were.

So we suffer in silence, lick our wounds, build a wall around our heart and our feelings and promise ourselves not to let anyone else in because we couldn't endure that kind of pain again. And in the process of doing that, we give up a piece of ourselves we can never reclaim.

Because it's a pain that never heals and a loss we never recover from.