While visiting a friend in the hospital, who was recovering from a stroke, he mentioned how much we can take our health for granted. I suddenly found myself telling him about an observation I first noticed several years ago. How many things do we all have in our lives, like friends, family, health, and shelter, that we take for granted and never appreciate that they are there?

EXPENSIVE SHIRTS AND PILLING

A bit of background first: many years ago, when I worked as an electronics engineer in Silicon Valley, I would wear nice shirts to work. That meant paying a bit more than usual for them, especially since most of them came from a specialty shop in England. One particular shirt from Munich had low pilling, so the label said to iron it inside out.

In those days, I would take my shirts to the cleaners, and they would come back nicely cleaned and ironed. I had expected the cleaners to spot the pilling and treat this shirt differently, after all, I spotted it right away.
As you are probably guessing by now, it came back with the pilling completely crushed!

After that, I decided to iron my own clothes. Since this was a job that I was going to “enjoy immensely”, it required a DVD and a strong cup of tea to drink while executing the process to help alleviate the boredom.

My wardrobe was empty, and I had run out of clothes; they had all been used and washed over the last few weeks, and the enormous pile of ironing was now a serious obstacle to finding somewhere to sit on my 4-person couch.

With a DVD selected and a hot cuppa at the ready, all I needed was the iron and ironing board, so into the small kitchen I went looking for the ironing board. Nothing there.

Well, maybe it’s in the pantry. No, nothing there.

It’s not in the sitting room, as I would never leave it out for visitors to see.

What about the downstairs cloakroom? No, not there.

I would never have put it in the garage, but I had better check just in case; nope, not there.

Oh, for goodness’ sake, I thought to myself. I live in a small 1300 sq ft townhome. How difficult can it be to hide an ironing board from yourself!!

In the famous words of Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

So I headed upstairs to continue my quest. In and out of all the wardrobes in all three bedrooms, I looked. Yes, at this point, I was taking the improbable option very seriously! Also, nothing in either of the two upstairs bathrooms. At this point, the only improbable thing left was that I had poltergeists and they had moved it.

Back downstairs I went.

SLOW DOWN AND OBSERVE

Okay, Paul. Slow down.

Start at the beginning and go through the whole house again slowly. Back into the kitchen I went. I glanced at my watch. It had been 20 minutes since I first started my search. I was beginning to get very grumpy.

Refill my cuppa and pause a moment, I thought.

As I went back into the kitchen to the tea kettle, there was the board, leaning against the kitchen wall!! I had put it there many, many weeks ago and had walked past it so many times that it had ceased to be separate from the wall. For all intents and purposes, it had become a part of the wall.

In that moment of realizing why I had not seen it, I suddenly wondered how many things I have in my life that are always in front of me, but I never see anymore. Just how many ironing boards do we have in our lives?

Right now, stop and think for a moment, name an ironing board in your life – something that you see in your life so much that you take it for granted.