It’s More Than I Can Bear

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I can and cannot tolerate in my life.
Tonight tested the limits.
After dinner at Plant post beach walk with Susan, I was working on my computer and looked for my phone.  I couldn’t find it –– which rarely happens –– and then thought it might still be in the car, parked in the driveway.
It wasn’t.
But I saw it on the ground, two feet away, the glass screen shattered in 3 places.  The crack at the top made it look sort of like Arnold at the end of the first TERMINATOR.
I immediately made an appointment for tomorrow, Thursday, at the Apple Store at 10:10 am (seemed nicely symmetrical) but then I thought, “It’s only 8 pm;  there’s a chance they’ll see me tonight without an appointment.”
The phone, by the way, was fully functional.  I was able to check email and receive and send texts and I spent 15 minutes on the phone with Dan while waiting.
There was, however, some danger of it shattering –– particularly since I tend to do my evening meditations with it and fall asleep with it attached.  At any point in the night, Belle and I might have woken up bleeding from shattered iPhone glass.
More than that, though, I realized that I just couldn’t tolerate having it in that condition, even for just 14 hours, if there was anything I could do to avoid it.
Oddly, I have far greater tolerance regarding my car.
I love driving and I love my life with my car, but I’m just not obsessed or in love with my vehicle.
I got the car used in LA but in near perfect condition.
I remember the first blemish:  someone or something had caused a crack in the back taillight. I even remember the day it happened and/or where I noticed it:  in Brentwood while filming something I’d written and produced for my friend Jude’s reel.
The next blemish was in Vancouver, a crazy attempt to park in a garage at a weird angle.  Just a little scrape though.
I pride myself on being an excellent driver — since 2009 I have driven from NYC to LA, and then from LA to Vancouver and back, along with most of my time in LA or Florida and needing to drive constantly.
No accidents EVER (except an odd scrape in the late 80s that has a fascinating backstory).
And yet lately, the dents on my car keep accumulating.
The biggest happened, quite frankly, while I was 3,000 miles away and had lent the car to a house-sitter.  According to the police report, totally NOT her fault (and I believe her) but a major cosmetic blemish.
Another serious nick from the garage door incident I’ve written about in this blog (oh, that Herb had a brother who did bodywork).
It’s funny because I both care a lot and not at all about these dents in my car, and if I were swimming in a few grand to spare, I’d definitely have them all fixed.  But I wonder why an imperfect phone means so much more to me.
It may be that the car has almost nothing to do with my identity.  I made a reasonable and informed choice when I got the car, but I was never personally that invested in cars, given that most of my adult life has been spent car-less in  NYC.
I have no firm conclusion, but it’s interesting that there are areas where I am a super-perfectionist (final drafts of books and scripts, design projects for LLS, Belle’s well-being) and others where I might even be described as negligent (too many to confess here-in.)
I definitely had a childhood where things were often left in disrepair for no particularly great reason.  Things were TOLERATED.
(Including lots of things that shouldn’t be tolerated, most notably a broken car door that I believe was temporarily held together with a man’s belt.)
Years ago I remember first hearing about a different version of LOA, called the 28 Laws of Attraction and Law #15 is:
TOLERATE NOTHING
At first, there’s a provocative knee-jerk reaction against this phrase.  Of course, TOLERANCE = GOOD.
But basically, according the 28 Laws, “When you put up with something, it costs you.”
And there’s a world of difference between “lovingly accepting something” and “putting up with it while grinding your teeth.”
I loved this idea of making TOLERATING NOTHING a principal.  In fact, I remember years ago while listening to a complicated problem of my cinematographer Joaquin about business cards and two phone lines and something else, boiling it down to this for him:
“You’ve either got to accept it completely, or change it.”
ACCEPT OR CHANGE –– another slogan I could use to run for office in 2016 (and if The Terminator can be elected governor…)
So I’m glad I got the iPhone replaced tonight (FYI:  I brought Belle hoping her cuteness would affect my chances of being seen without a genius appointment) and more and more I want to be LESS TOLERANT.
To quote another great 80s movie, THELMA & LOUISE:  “You get what you settle for.”