There’s a kitchen drawer in my house that doesn’t close all the way. It sticks about two inches from shut, and you have to lift the front edge slightly and push just so — a small, specific technique — to get it flush. I learned how to do it a long time ago. I just don’t, most of the time. I walk past it a dozen times a day with it sitting there, slightly open, and I don’t stop.
My wife has mentioned it. Not in any serious way. More like the way you’d mention a smudge on a window — not demanding it be cleaned, just noticing it out loud. I’ve thought about tightening the glide, or planing the edge, or looking up whatever the actual fix is supposed to be. I know it’s not a hard problem. It just hasn’t become the kind of problem that gets solved.
What I’ve started to notice is that the drawer bothers me in some moments and not at all in others. On a slow morning, coffee in hand, it looks like a small failure — evidence of something slightly wrong in the house that I’m tolerating instead of addressing. But in the middle of a busy afternoon, grabbing scissors or a takeout menu, it doesn’t register at all. The drawer is the same. I’m different.
I think that’s what interests me about it now. Not the drawer itself, but what it reveals about whatever is happening in me on a given day. Annoyance at a stuck drawer is rarely really about the drawer.
There’s probably a sermon illustration in here somewhere, and I’m going to resist it. Not everything needs to be unpacked into a lesson.
But I will say this: I’ve become a little suspicious of the version of myself who needs everything closed all the way. Who can’t walk past a small imperfection without mentally filing it, measuring it, assigning it a place on a list. That version of me is efficient, maybe. But he’s also a little exhausting to live with — even for me, from the inside.
The drawer will get fixed eventually. Or it won’t. I’m not sure that part matters as much as I used to think.