I'm in the kitchen and the white cabinet doors are all around me. I reach up to open the door in front of me. I put my fingers on the cabinet knob and as I move to pull the door open, the knob stays in my hand and door doesn't move. I study the end of the knob that should be connected to the door. I look at the metal stud that sticks out from where the knob used to be. I test the likelihood of reconnecting the knob to the door. Nope, it is not a matter of twisting or jamming it back on, it is not going to reconnect. After opening the door with my fingers on the tiny stud and pulling out the tea pot, and here's the best part, I put the knob back on the stud and leave it there while I toss some tea bags into the pot. There is the knob waiting for another time when it can spring a full load of disappointment onto me or Sheila or whichever guest decides they want a cuppa.
New shot...I am in the kitchen with white doors, several of them now have tiny metal studs instead of knobs. I open the cabinet door by pulling on the tiny metal stud and pull out the tea pot.
Here's the thing. Its always a surprise when one of these knobs comes off in your hand even when you know you had just slipped it back in place a moment ago in a tiny effort to fool entropy. It has potential to be a lab for measuring memory and procrastination. For example, how many times do you pull the stupid knobs off the doors before your replace them; 10 times on ten incompetent knobs? 20 pulls on 1 knob and one time on 9 knobs? Is everybody different in their futile knob pulling behaviour? I wonder....
This year of knob pulling has been instructive when I think of it as a metaphor. We moved into the house a year ago which was when we disconnected from my employment in Regina to create a nest on Nature Island. In the metaphor the knob failures and the disappointments and surprises where little instructions to let go. Resettling has not been settling in real life. For me it have been sort of emotionally storm tossed, in part because I still feel bound to my old roles of provider and facilitator of human insights. I know the knobs don't have inherent intelligence and God didn't intend the knobs to give me a lesson but I was able to use the knob fiasco to some advantage. I saw myself in a mind- movie that helped me understand loss of connection. It was both funny and sad.
This week we have new knobs on the kitchen cabinets. They are functional and unobtrusive. They don't make a statement but they will do the job until we find the knobs of our dreams and if our dreams don't materialize, there may be a lesson in that as well.
