hands
The Rubber Gloves
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate doing the dishes? Well I do. A lot.
And my aversion increased ten-fold when I recently got what’s called “Acute Dermatitis” on my hands. Really, that’s just a fancy way to say that washing the dishes makes my hands blister and crack and bleed. Not fun.
For a while, I left stacks of dishes for my husband to do when he got home from work. But I hated that and felt horribly guilty because he has so little free time anyway. In addition, it turns out that I hate a dirty kitchen worse than I hate doing the dishes. It was a rotten dilemma, because Acute Dermatitis really hurts. It seemed like I couldn’t win.
I was complaining to my mom, and she said, “Well why don’t you just go buy some rubber gloves?”
It was an “Aha! moment” for sure. The thought had never occurred to me. Never. But it was the perfect solution—well, almost. Hiring a maid would have been the perfect solution, but this was a pretty darn good one (and much more based on reality).
No more acute dermatitis. No more dirty kitchen. Granted, I still have to DO the dishes (which are never ending!), but the gloves are new enough that they’re like a fun little toy. 😉 I almost look forward to it. Almost.
So this story is a little like life (and writing novels). We run into problems that seem unsolvable. We can’t think of any good ways to get past them. We feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.
But sometimes, all it takes is a willingness to look outside the box. Maybe they aren’t what we’d expect, but the solutions are there, ready to shock us with their simplicity.
When’s the last time you found an unexpectedly simple solution to a dire problem?