Stemming the Breach

My grandma once told me that if you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves.  It is one of many truths I learned from my grandparents, who I now know had the wisdom of Solomon without the recognition or power.

I live on the bend of a small river.  It is a lovely view, wild and untouched, and if I use enough imagination to erase the sounds of the expressway that sits about a mile away, I can get to a place where there is no trace of man.  Just the other day, I watched in delight as two river otters swam back and forth across my field of vision along the opposite bank.  Hope they hang around...those are the best kinds of neighbors.

Anyway, like all things, there is a price to pay for having a river as a backyard.  Namely, if you are going to live on a riverbank, you are going to be on the downhill side of a slope.  The road in front of my house sits about window-level to it, and the slope continues from there quite steeply. 

Yesterday I went through my front yard picking up little pieces of gravel that have washed from the road.  It is almost time to mow, and if the challenges of mowing on a slope aren't enough, it certainly adds a dimension to have pieces of gravel hurtling toward you at breakneck speeds.  So, yeah, this tedious task is a necessary one. 

Somewhere in the middle of this chore, I noticed a pattern:  that the amount of gravel in the yard directly corrolated to where there were not railroad ties or large rocks placed by the road to keep them in place.  The gravel, then, was in the yard because there was a breach in the system.  It all goes back to cause and effect--if someone would just take care of the cause, then the effect would change. 

So the whole purpose of this rambling post was to get to this point:

How many times do we pick up the pieces instead of putting the work into it to keep things in place?

How many times do we not act until it blows up in our faces?

We watch our marriages crumble and fade, ignore the small bad habits of our children until we have major behavioral problems to correct, charge yet one more thing on our credit cards, stick around in crummy jobs because of benefits or vacation time or because we are just too damn lazy to find something else. 

We settle for less than we have to because investing the time to fix it right the first time is just too much work--until there is a breach--

And then if we don't take the time to pick the pieces up, somebody could actually lose an eye...

Me?  I'm going to finish picking up those little pieces of gravel--and then I'm going to take my grandma's advice--and stem that breach for good.