The high cost of inattentiveness

My neighbour asked if I had a compressor. He just wanted a little portable one to pump up the tyres on his trailer. I've had three or four of those in my life. I used one regularly for years till it gave up its ghost, and the others I lent to friends and never got back. I'm sick of replacing them. I think the most recent got passed around or left in a car and is now somewhere outside Alice Springs. That's all right - it's a known consequence of unshackling yourself from possessive materialism.

I lugged my big compressor out onto the verandah, where its long hose could reach the neighbour's driveway. Trouble is, I was half asleep, and the compressor (which is quite heavy) is terribly unstable when tilted even a few degrees from the vertical. So I dropped it through the lower pane of my front door, the same pane that I had to replace when I first bought the door. Not even spectacularly: just nudge...smash. All over in half a second. I cut an artery in my finger prising out the shards. Now that was spectacular! The bugger of it is, that, being Easter Sunday, I am two days away from being able to replace it, and it will have to be done the morning my old Mum arrives to stay for an indefinite while. A morning I was preferring to reserve for calm and mindful preparation for the visit.

I still have the measurements from the first replacement, and that's what hurts most about this incident: I do not like to repeat myself! The door thing is yet another reminder that I do... over and over again, with the characters cast in a slightly different alignment and the sequencing reconfigured, almost imperceptibly. Sometime soon, the phone will ring, and I will pick it up...

Still, the neighbour's happy, and pleased at my generosity, and that's all that counts.