Ship Shape Sink vs. Struggle

Yes, this is a picture of my sink. My sink is clean and in good working order. But a week ago, it decided to act up. It caused, what I would call, a struggle.

I admit, I like when things flow. No pun intended, but my sink was not flowing.

Let's go deep...

When things in life don't flow, it creates a bit of a struggle. In the case of my sink clogging, it caused some extra time and attention I didn't want to give. It made cleaning my dishes more taxing. And when I tried to run the dishwasher, the water backed up and spilled over underneath and filled up the sink with unnecessary water that had to be hand drained and disposed of elsewhere. Struggle.

Let's go deeper...I admit, I fight against struggle. My feelings get wrapped up in the situation at hand and I overthink the solution. I'm a 1 on the Enneagram. Things need to be in order.

Until they are, I tend to fight with it. My husband is a 5. He assesses the situation, makes a plan, and works the plan. Feelings? Yeah, there are no feelings involved. If there were, he's over it in a matter of minutes.

When I first learned that struggle was a gift, I was skeptical. It's an experience we go through to make us stronger. Did my sink incident make me stronger? Probably not. But thinking it through, it really wasn't a big deal. Just a huge inconvenience...that is, for a 1.

Baking soda and distilled vinegar was the first attempt. Liquid Plumber was the second. All temporary fixes to what became a complicated problem. I was out of ideas. My husband wanted to go big, so we rented a piece of equipment from Home Depot. They call them snakes. It swirls wire down your water pipes to blast out the debris. This attempt worked. Yes, we could have called a plumber and saved ourselves some frustration. But, we are frugal. The snake cost $27.00. A plumber would have been an easy $65.00. Did we bring upon ourselves more than we should have? Sometimes we do that when struggles come our way. In the case of the sink? Not really.