December 04, 2004
Le Ding
I've had the car for a little over three weeks and on Wednesday it got into its first "incursion of personal space". The long and the short of it is that, around 6:40 p.m., in the parking lot of the Burbank Fry's store, a woman in a giant SUV backed into my passenger side door.
The damage is slight. There's a paint chip high on the door around the size of a quarter. There's also a depression where the bumper mashed into it. There's no other apparent damage. The window and door locks still work fine.
The estimate I got to bang out the door and repaint it came to almost $480, which won't come out of my pocket.
The whole thing ticked me off initially, and it wasn't even really about the damage. It was that the car was damaged so soon after I bought it. I also had no control over it. It was probably the lack of control that bugged me the most.
On the other hand, as bumps go, I suppose the ones where you had no hand in the matter are the best ones.
Posted by KinCross at December 4, 2004 02:43 PM
Comments
I had a similar experience with my own car -- I hadn't owned it long before it was whacked by some neighborhood kids with their bike.
I thought of the Buddhist idea of mindfulness, and a story -- I think it was in one of Thich Nhat Hanh's books -- about a monk and a teacup. At some point in the future, the teacup is already broken, so he is mindful to enjoy it now. [Okay, so I'm a sucky storyteller...]
Anyway, "the teacup is already broken" has become a bit of a mantra for me. It's amazing how well it helps diffuse the pointless emotion (typically anger) that I felt over things getting broken or damaged...
Posted by: gemma at December 28, 2004 05:22 AM