What I Can Do

What I can do is put 2 and 2 togther to come up with 4. That is, I seem to be able to make sense of the world around me and still remain in a positive mode. I do this by discerning what matters from it all. I go right for the details. I have a knack for solving problems. I am good at it. It doesn't seem to matter what field the problem is in, just that there is a problem. for every problem, there are several solutions on many levels. People don't want to solve their problems , they just want them to go away. Most people don't want to hear that they cause all their own problems through having the wrong mind set about the problem in the first place. If they have decided where the problem is going to be, then they have made a problem where there might not be one. A good example is me trying to replace a headlight. I determined that I might lose the screws that attach the bezel so I made a jig to hold the screw and let it fall to me when it fell. Lo and behold, the screw fell into an impossible place to get at in the truck frame and was lost. So I abandoned my jig and the other 3 screws came out fine. I made that screw drop the wrong way by believing that it would. I came out right in the end. What I believed came true. What can I say, I'm an engineer, I have a thing about being right and most of the time I pay for it. Now I have a headlight that is held in by 3 special screws, instead of 4. Right and wrong are different sides of the same coin. You can be right from your point of view and think the other person is wrong, when really there are several ways to skin a cat and the only person who is in real trouble is the expert, my wife proves this to me daily by thinking outside my box. She comes around and blows holes in all favorite truisms by giving me options that I , as an expert, cannot see. Most of the time, I solve problems by the crank and grind method, while she leaps to any other possible solution. I think she does this because she is left-handed. Left-handed people seem to use the right side of their brain more than right-handed people do. We make quite a formidable pair when it comes to solving a problem. We are not always liked by everyone we work for. Being right is not popular so we spend a lot of time unemployed. People don't like know-it-all's. When you see 2 people walking down the street and they are having a discussion about which way to turn to get to a place that you "know" how to get to, do you offer advice. If you do, then you are often not appreciated for it, because you disturb their evolution. Maybe they need to find a solution on their own and maybe you should MYOB a little more and live and let live. The way to get along in this world is to let them ask you first before you barge in with the only solution to solve what may be a simple problem to you. Another real life example is in order. I have dabbled in the stock market for some years with some success and more failure. I, in my wisdom, thought I knew the answer, which, of course, I didn't, but that is another story. Anyway, I invited my family to share in my stock market winnings and some of them invested with me as their guide. Things were going well until the stock market crashed to a low no one had ever seen before and is still there. To be frank, I lost my family a little of their money and got out, but in the process, I got everyone mad at me, lost all my funds, and had to sell my house to get back to square one. My wife and everyone else hardly speak to me these days. They don't even remember the winnings that they enjoyed. All they remember is that I lost their money for them in a game that they and I didn't fully under-stand, until it was too late, hindsight is a wonderful thing. I took them for a ride down a street that they wouldn't have gone down if I hadn't been around, and now they are the worse for it. They blame me and they are right. I should have let them be. My point here is that most problems solve themselves in time, without outside intervention from so-called experts like me. Maybe that is why I am unemployed most of the time. Here I sit, an expert at the details that nobody cares about because the universe is also an expert at them. Every solution has its own time.