Wrong Railing

You just never know, do you?

That’s a lesson I seem to be learning over and over again. I remember my mother telling me when I was a teenager that you never knew about people just by looking at them. She came by this wisdom after a long lifetime of being a good listener. In her job as secretary to a large church in my hometown, she knew that people often have troubles you know nothing about, and that some of the largest donors to the church were more likely to be found in overalls than a suit and tie.

And you certainly never know what life is going to throw at you. That’s been brought home to me recently too. I’m a big planner, always trying to organize my life. Yet no matter how well I plan, situations often take on a life of their own and hurry down the road before I’m ready. It happens in big things and in small. I’ve reached a point this year where I’m no longer trying to plan my life more than a month or two in advance. And this month even that horizon seems to be too far out.

This week, I came home to find that workers from a wrought iron fabrication company that I’d engaged had installed the wrong railing on our front porch. The circumstances make for a long, dull story. Accidental miscommunication was the problem. (Ever seen the Warner Brothers cartoon where Daffy and Bugs get into “pronoun trouble”?) I had to decide what to do. Should I insist they cut out this new railing and put in the design I’d chosen? That would mean a lot of extra expense for the iron company, and a big mess for me. But I’d gone with a company that was not the low bid, specifically because of the design. Sigh.

The business owner came out to see me the next day, and I made a proposal to him that we drop the price for the work to match my low bid from another company. He was happy not to have to redo the whole thing, and I decided I could live with the railing that had been installed. In fact, now that several days have gone by, I’m starting to think that the “wrong railing” might actually be a better design than the one I had chosen.

It makes me think. If this lesson—that giving up total control can work out just fine—can be applied to a railing, maybe it’s true for all the other chaotic changes that are making me crazy right now. Maybe all this “accidental” stuff in life is really just meant to be that way. You never know.