Ever had that moment when the situation that you have been agonizing over for a long time suddenly seems as clear as if someone drained the murky fish tank water? It’s a moment when you sit back and murmur to yourself (out loud if you’re like me) something along the lines of “Well now, imagine that! I didn’t think of it like that before!”
There are times you come upon a problem that has such a lasting effect on you that it stays with you for months – even years – whether you manage to solve it, patch it or bypass it. Sometimes it’s one of those self-defining problems; the ones that help you define yourself or your worldview, help you recognize your inner strengths. Other times it’s just a pesky, annoying problem that you could well do without right now, but just because of the timing or the circumstances, it stays with you.
I’ve had a few of those. My husband says I think too much, but I believe that it is that “thinking too much” that helps me find these moments of clarity which in turn helps me understand life and the human race. I sometimes return to those problems and think on them. Mostly because I worry that the way I dealt with them back then was inferior but in some cases, I look back simply to analyze whether there was something I might have been able to do differently having different information or the experience of the problem in the first place.
It is at those times that I strike gold and find “that moment of clarity”. The “AHA” moment when you realize just what the problem was back then and how you should have solved it – assuming you hadn’t solved it at all or only partially before.
Here is a perfect example, and one which strangely is very timely in it’s occurrence: I am sitting here at my desk attempting to construct this blog post when I get a text message from my husband “What’s wrong with your phone?”
Of course, I am stymied. I am receiving the text, so clearly there can’t be too much wrong with it, am I right? So I check some things and send him a text “Nothing as far as I know, why?”
His response: “I can’t call you”
So I attempt to call him and get a message “We’re sorry your call cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later.” Being that I have worked for 2 wireless phone companies at this point, the first thing I do is turn off the phone and turn it back on. Resetting the phone solves small issues … but not this one. Now I am not even getting the message.
So I place one call to AT&T and after explaining my situation to the agent, am told to hang up and attempt to complete calls to numbers other than my husband’s which I was able to – to just about every other number I tried, just not hubby’s. That agent was to call me back and after about 20 minutes, and no call, I called 611 again.
Second agent and I had to tell my story all over again. Just at the point at which this 2nd agent was about to tell me something, the call gets dropped. So I call a 3rd time. The 3rd agent gives me her name and tells me there are no notes on my account for the previous calls and so I tell my story yet again – this time I am expressing frustration at having to do so. To her credit, she apologized and commiserated. She in turn tells me to hang up and turn the phone off so she can do an “over-the-air-activation” and call me back within 3 minutes. So I am to turn off my phone for 3 minutes and call her back. I give her 5 minutes and after 10 minute realize there will be no return call here either.
It is my 4th call to them that I finally get some information that rings that bell and I get my “AHA” moment. Apparently, there is a problem back in Kentucky where my home record is stored. You see, this is how the cellular network works – the phone is registered with the equipment in the location where you get the phone and no matter where in the world you go, when you attempt to use the network, that record needs to be consulted before call services can be completed. And … I learned this most concretely from my experience at Bluegrass Cellular earlier this year.
That moment of clarity, the moment when something I learned made sense in a very real and personal way and made me realize the problem I was having and understand it thoroughly.
So… have any moments of clarity recently?
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