What My Shower Head Can Help Teach You About Life

The bathroom in a condo I was renting had the most awful shower head. It came with three settings: bearable, rip your skin off water pressure, and barely a drizzle. I chose the bearable setting most days. When I wasn’t feeling adventurous enough to kick it up a notch and risk bruising.

Problem is that the bearable setting was erratic. The nozzles spewed water in random directions. Most sprayed at a normal forward trajectory, but a few went rogue.

On many occasions, one of the nozzles squirted water directly into my eye. This was even though the shower head was tilted as far down and away from my face as possible. A couple other nozzles sprayed right at the shower curtain — sounding like rain hitting a car windshield. I had to point the shower head toward the wall to avoid soaking my bathroom floor.

Showers weren’t enjoyable or relaxing for me anymore. It became more of an executed necessity. Get in and get out.

For two years, I complained about this despicable shower head that left me with choosing the lesser of three evil options. I grumbled and rolled my eyes just about every morning I stepped in to battle the spraying water. Starting my days off at peak annoyance.

I complained about this contraption until one day it dawned on me that I could replace it. I could simply unscrew and swap the awful shower head for a better one. Then change it back when I moved out of the condo.

I felt silly for having waited so long to arrive at this solution. For having been so frustrated with something so fixable. Why wasn’t replacement my immediate thought after taking the first substandard shower?

Then it hit me. I wasn’t looking for a fix. I was content to complain. Turning on the shower and lamenting how terrible it was became an intuitive habit. I wasn’t thinking about how I could improve the condition, only that it was undesirable.

This is unlike me. I’m a solution-oriented problem-solver by nature. Yet, with such a trivial situation, I fell into such a fruitless practice.

It made me think about how we do this in life, with issues of greater consequence. How we so often gripe about things within our control while taking no action to address the matter. Futile fussing becomes second nature.

There is space for venting. I can appreciate the positive effects of getting something off your chest, talking through challenges, and verbally expressing how you feel. In heavier matters, sometimes all you need is to be heard.

It’s when the venting evolves into continuous grumbling that it crosses a line. Once we start “venting” as often as anyone will listen, we’re doing something else. If we revive the same frustrations over and over only to feel frustrated, it becomes pointless.

Stressing doesn’t make anything better. Complaining has never changed a condition, remedied a single problematic scenario, or repaired any damage. It doesn’t even make us feel better.

In fact, complaining often makes us feel worse. More upset. More irritated. More defeated. Less powerful.

With an assist from Amazon Prime shipping, a newer, more accurate shower head was sitting on my doorstep about six hours after my epiphany. I continued pondering the two-year gripe session that preceded this change as a metaphor for life.

After unboxing, detaching, and replacing, I hopped in to take my upgraded shower for a spin. The water ran down my back in flawless streaks. Immersed in familiar but since forgotten bliss, a fitting quote popped into my head to accompany the lesson of which I’d been reminded.

If you don’t like where you are, move! You are not a tree. — Jim Rohn

May we all be agile and active participants in the shaping of our lives.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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