I put up with that for a whole year?! ARGH…..

The day my printer taught me a life lesson!

I have to tell you something—and please don’t judge me… but it made me SO happy. 😄

🖨️ For almost a year now, my printer has been displaying an error message—“ADF Jam”—pretty much every time I tried to make a copy or scan a sheet of paper. Except there was never any paper jammed in it. Never. ARGGGG….. And two out of three times, I couldn’t make a copy or scan anything.

It’s been a YEAR since I got this message…

ONE YEAR!

Just a minor annoyance, you might say. Except that I put up with it. Week after week. Month after month. Because I didn’t have time to take the printer in for repairs, and especially because I couldn’t do without a printer.

Last week, I went there, and while it was being “repaired,” I finally decided to buy a new printer. And when I plugged it into my computer… nothing happened. No error message.

I scanned and copied some pages just for the fun of seeing if it worked. ✅

And then I felt something I wasn’t expecting: an IMMENSE sense of relief. It was as if an invisible weight had just been lifted off my shoulders. 🪶 I felt lighter. More at peace. Happy, quite simply. All because of a printer!

Why Do We Put Up With Little Annoyances?

It got me thinking for a long time after I closed the box for the new machine. How many annoyances do we drag around with us in our lives, telling ourselves, “It’s not that big of a deal” or “I don’t have time to deal with it”? 🤔

A piece of clothing that no longer fits. A chore we keep putting off. A leaky faucet. A “little noise” in the car that we’d rather ignore. A broken object we work around instead of fixing. A conversation we put off. A habit that no longer serves us but that we keep out of convenience.

We tell ourselves it’s not serious enough to justify the time, energy, or discomfort of dealing with it. So we just work around it. We develop habits to avoid it, work around it, or tolerate it. And it becomes almost invisible, like background noise we no longer pay attention to.

Except that it’s never really invisible. Every annoyance we put up with takes up a little space in our minds. Often just a tiny bit of space, but it adds up to all the other tiny spaces occupied by all the other little annoyances. And that accumulation—it weighs on us. Even when we don’t realize it anymore.

The Day We Finally Deal With It

And on the day we finally take care of it—even if it’s just a tiny thing—we feel that same sense of relief. That lightness. That little burst of happiness. 💫

It’s almost always simpler than we imagined. In our minds, we’d built a whole mountain out of this little pebble. The time it would take. The complications it would cause. And then we tackle it, and… it wasn’t so bad after all. The relief we feel isn’t just proportional to the size of the problem we’ve solved—it’s also proportional to the time we spent putting it off.

My friend Mimi once wrote this to me on a piece of paper: When you have a little pebble in your shoe, you don’t have to keep it there to keep moving forward!

I kept this little note in plain sight for years, on the bulletin board in my office, to remind myself that if something gets too annoying, I don’t have to put up with it. Since I moved, my office layout has changed, and that little piece of paper must be tucked away somewhere. And I had almost forgotten about it! Thanks to my printer for reminding me of it a year later—with far less subtlety than my little scrap of paper!

And above all, learn to laugh it off

Because there’s another option, while you’re waiting to deal with the annoyance—or even after you’ve dealt with it: laugh it off.

Laughing at the fact that we put up with an error message for a whole YEAR for nothing (laughing at ourselves). Laughing at all the energy you put into working around the problem instead of fixing it. Laughing at the mountain you imagined you’d have to climb, when the solution actually took just a few minutes.

This is one of the things I’ve been teaching for over 20 years in laughter yoga: laughter won’t fix your leaky faucet or your broken printer (what a shame! HAHAHA). But it completely changes the weight we place on the annoyance while we’re dealing with it. It creates a little breathing room, a little distance, between us and the problem. And that breathing room is often exactly what allows us to take action instead of continuing to endure in silence.

So yes, deal with whatever’s bothering you. But in the meantime—and even afterward—have a good laugh about it. You, first and foremost.

Your assignment for this week

🌀 Identify ONE irritant that you’ve been putting up with for too long. Just one. No need to tackle all ten at once—just the one that comes to mind right now, the one with a little voice telling you, “I should have dealt with this a long time ago.”

And take a step—even a small one—to free yourself from it this week.

It could be: making that call you’ve been putting off for months. Throwing away (or fixing) the object that annoys you every time you see it. Having that conversation you’ve been avoiding. Making that appointment. Making that change—even a tiny one.

Come on! Get that little pebble out of your shoe.

Take care of yourself, and above all, get rid of one source of irritation this week. It’s a relief, and it feels SO GOOD! I know a thing or two about that! HAHAHA!

Linda 💛