A Boat Without a Plug
You are working on a project. So far everything is going well. Your desk is a mess and your clothes smell like coffee and/or sweat. Scattered pieces of work are slowly edging toward each other so the project takes form. You sigh as you reach a stopping point, satisfied with the fact that you are halfway finished with a thorough job. Only to learn it's not so thorough. The body chilling effect stuns you in an instant. Your eyes snap on the problem and accordingly each inch of your body slowly succumbs to regret. You remain still for a moment wondering if it could be true. Could you really have missed something so simple? In a matter of seconds your half-done masterpiece looks like a full blown mistake. It's amazing how much one missed element can matter.
That’s exactly how I felt on a steaming hot Georgia Monday a few weeks ago. I was reviewing films I had uploaded from a long weekend of capturing an event on the humid hills of Athens, Georgia. As I scrolled through footage without bothering to listen to their audio, I began to put together the story I eventually hoped to release to YouTube for my boss’s business. I had just started using some new equipment which meant the picture was clear, and this time each shot was captured with a role in the loose plot I had thought up. Just before I began listening to see how the audio aligned with my plans, my boss burst into the room. He held a small tool in his hand. Instantly I knew what it meant. The microphone receptacle had been plugged into the camera even though I hadn’t used the compatible microphone. My face flamed in embarrassment as I notched up the volume on my iPad to confirm. The audio didn’t exist.
One small element — yet I knew I wouldn’t be able to use the videos I had gotten, at least not how I had intended to use them. A story couldn’t be made with them the way I had planned. The interviews, to my horror, were silent. The laughs were choked and soundless. The crisp punctuations of impromptu sound-effects were drowned by the overwhelming sound of static from the microphone left behind in our camera bag.
My heart sank. Not all at once - but the way sticks float down in water or looney tunes characters hover in the air for a moment before they realize their mistake. Thoughts of how to fix it filled my mind — but it was an impossible fix. My brain was slowly combusting in disappointment. The way aspirin drifts to the bottom of a glass, slowly exploding the whole way. The way a boat without a plug gradually takes on water. One small mistake, but there was no other cure to the huge problem it had created. Things can prove utterly useless without the simple aid of their counterpart.
Last week was a break from work; again I got to experience the sinking feeling of one missing element. I was on a boat for what everyone thought would be a relaxing morning. Then the engine gurgled like a garbage disposal in a wet sink. We stopped and the boat sloshed around even without a current. When the engine was thrusted again, the back of the boat filled up with water. We opened the port at the back and found the hollow bottom of our boat was rapidly taking on water. We were sinking.
By the grace of God there was a marina nearby that was willing to use their lift to help us. They pulled us out and drained gallons of water from the thirty minutes we had been on the river — much longer and we would have been submerged. A few hours later we were on dry ground leaving the department store with a $1.35 cure to what was almost a $1000+ crisis. A plug no wider than a quarter. It was light and small enough for a baby to cover with their hand — but without it the boat would have sunk.
Life is full of large scenarios, useless without an element that is a fraction of their size. However small, there is a general rule for most working organisms that they are useless without the tiny baubles to make them tick. Your heart, for example, is relatively small — it contains less than 0.5 percent of your body weight, though without it your body wouldn’t function. SD cards (another essential element for videography) are a defining piece in cameras, as are batteries in flashlights, and bolts in ferris wheels. Without the small parts to hold them together, most (if not all) complicated machines and nearly all large operations would literally collapse. The same is with stairs and conversations — even, to use the clique term, steps. Without small forward movements, one can never expect to get far.
Sometimes the ‘baby step’ items on our lists are the hardest to face. We have big goals, sure, but the actual process can be most grueling in the simple tasks that build the end product. We make our ways to avoid the small stairs — elevators, so to speak, to cost a fraction of the time and exercise. But the missed element even then still remains — the exercise. Sometimes our shortcuts hold us back by leaving us with a lack of experience once we have finally arrived. Slowly but surely we realize there is more than we can take on. We’re pelted to the bottom again, faced with the decision: to use another elevator or the same old stairs.
It's a constant battle for anyone who is learning anything. It would almost make sense to say “for students” or “intellectuals” — but I am one who believes there is much more exposure to both growth and failure that happens outside of the classroom. In any learning process, many steps have to be taken. Like learning a formula, each individual addend must be built before they can all be integrated. If they aren’t, the finished product can never be fully understood — an acceptable feat if one isn’t hoping to grow. Taking thorough “baby steps,” however, is repeatedly proved the most effective means of growth which builds the strongest set of skills in the end.
Is it inconvenient? You can bet. Frustrating? More often than not. Will the small processes that build character nearly cause you to forsake any good character you may have? They wouldn’t build anything if they didn’t. But I have learned (and I’m still learning; this is me kicking my own butt) it is better to stop and consider each part in a project, to execute it with due diligence than have to return to it and pick it apart later for the sake of a simple fault. It is better to get down in the dirt and build a foundation yourself than take a shortcut that will end in one that hardly lasts a few years. To truly learn, one must truly work. Is that to say there will be less failures? From my limited experience, I believe there will be more! But the task of resolving each failure as learning progresses is what makes the finished product truly worthwhile.
To compare this fastidious sort of “baby step,” approach to the way Jesus lived is almost unnecessary, but in a way it might be easy to miss. If one was to describe Him in all of his majestic power, the internal picture such a description would create would look nothing like Jesus did on earth. Was he still powerful here? Just as much as ever. Still, he chose to do every step in the process, even learn with other children in his young age when he knew he didn’t have to.
There is a certain humility it costs to truly learn anything. It’s a deep humility I’ve fought for and failed to exercise over and over again since the beginning of my learning, arguably since day one of my life. We are all born prideful, born as if we know best — first shown in self preservation, then childish selfishness, still more in a growing, deceitful sort of pride. Pride is deceptive, and the object of its most potent deception is the one it characterizes. The beginning to overcoming it is the ability to learn — to allow, if nothing else, sheer curiosity to move you to question every process.
Humility often urges us to dig deeper and ask questions — questions in themselves are almost always* an acknowledgement that we don’t already know the answer. There is value in asking questions, and walking through the baby steps. Value in the small failures and insurmountably more joy in the success that follows. It may not appear a success to achieve the small things — but minuscule elements, after all, are what make up a system, a machine, a lifetime. Like bolts in a Ferris wheel, an SD card in a camera, a plug to a boat. Though small, even cheap, in the end you’ll be happy you took the time to invest and truly learn the process.
©Goodstrong Words June 2022
