Someone has to be it

I call it negative inspiration.

You know how you meet someone or read a story about someone amazing who has triumphed in life despite incredible tragedy. Yeah, this isn’t it.

Negative inspiration is like your mom telling you to eat your broccoli because there’s starving children in Africa. Except negative inspiration is better because it’s real.

I mean no disrespect to the children of Africa, starving or otherwise, but something happening to a friend or family member or neighbor or your regular checker at the grocery store, those things are real.

I’m certain it makes me a bad person or considerably bad — or even partly bad with an angel hedging its bets that this is a downward trend in my character and preparing an uncomfortable berth for me on some level of hell — but when I’m feeling like life just keeps picking me up and throwing me under the bus, I do not want to hear about how someone got his or her act together and became a philanthropist and a bestselling composer of inspirational show tunes. I just don’t.

That is not going to make me feel better or decide to suck it up and deal with my problem. I can’t see the path from my abject misery to the winner’s podium. I need to see someone or know someone who is in the thick of a bigger, badder, worser, more dire problem than mine. They don’t even have to be coping with the problem very well. Of course, I hope they’re coping well, even succeeding (because I’m not a complete jerk). To curb that oh-poor-me whine in my head, though, I need to be able to definitively point to an actual person or people and say, “Pam, shut the valve on your whine box, at least your life isn’t as bad as that.”

I don’t mean it to be mean, really, but someone else’s raw deal simply puts mine in perspective and inspires me to suck it up and deal with things. If they can keep functioning or at least breathing with that mess of a life, who am I to despair. Right?

That’s negative inspiration. It’s a real thing.

The trouble with it, though, is that at some point it’s your turn. You are the negative thing that people point to and say, “Well, at least I don’t have it as bad as that poor schmuck.” And that poor schmuck is you.

Rest easy, though, this time it’s my turn. I am here to help put life in perspective.

Due to a break in an unknown location along about a quarter-mile of underground water line on my property, I do not have running water in my house. Anywhere in my house. Not for cooking, cleaning, flushing, showering, rinsing that bit of schmutz off your hand. Nada. I also do not have running water to any of my hydrants and automatic horse waterers. Any of them.

I do have water to a toilet and one spigot in the far end of the shop. That’s roughly 300 feet away from the front door of my house and about 230 feet of it open to the elements — wind, negative temps, snow and all. I will not have water in my house until, at best, the ground thaws sometime this spring.

In the meantime, that functioning toilet and water spigot, plus heat, electricity, a 100-foot hose and, now, a water heater in the shop make all the difference.

Worse things have happened in the history of the world.

Certainly, I don’t have to go very far to find people worse off than I am right now — yes, even now — so I’m not whining so much as I am sighing in resignation to this temporary lifestyle.

I share my story not for sympathy, but solely in hope that it will serve others. If just one person feels their troubles feel eased by comparison to mine, then I am happy to slog through this miserable experience.

You are welcome. I am happy to serve. May my tragedy be your negative inspiration for a brighter day.

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I’m not above sacrificing for my fellow humans at [email protected].